Open Access Publishing Agreements: News and Quota Updates

Discover the current open access publishing agreements in place, allowing options for publishing research open access at no cost to the author.

Upcoming OA information sessions

Your Open Access Publishing Options

Online via Zoom: Thursday, 25 September 2025
Start time: 2:30pm
BOOK HERE

In person: Monday, 20 October 2025
James Joyce Library, Level 1, Library Link 3, James Joyce Library Building
Start time: 11:00
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Jenny Collery (Scholarly Communications Librarian) and Laura Zaliene (Collections & Metadata Librarian) will explore Open Access Publishing. We aim to empower UCD authors when choosing how to publish Open Access (OA). We will cover depositing research outputs in the Research Repository UCD (Green OA), free Open Access publishing (Diamond), and UCD Library's Open Access Publishing Agreements (Gold). We will also answer the following common questions from researchers:

How do I meet the Open Access requirements of my research funder?
What does Rights Retention mean?
What Creative Commons Licence should I use?
Is my selected journal covered by UCD Library's Open Access Publishing Agreement, and how can I ensure I am eligible to avail of these deals?
How do limited OA quota agreements work, and how can I find out when they are running out?

Please come along if you are a UCD researcher, author, or staff member who needs to know about Open Access Publishing. All other questions on this area welcome.

Limited annual APC quota updates

OA Agreement	APC quotas expected to run out in 2025*
IEEE	Likely to run out by the end of 2025, no exact date is available yet.
Oxford University Press (OUP)	December, 2025
American Chemical Society (ACS)	APC QUOTA IS FULLY USED UP as of 5th September, 2025. This agreement is now closed for the remainder of the year.
Springer	APC QUOTA IS FULLY USED UP as of 12th September, 2025. This agreement is now closed for the remainder of the year.
Taylor and Francis	APC QUOTA IS FULLY USED UP as of 30th July, 2025. This agreement is now closed for the remainder of the year.
Wiley - Hybrid (subscription) journals	Likely to run out by the end of 2025, no exact date is available yet.
Wiley - Gold (fully Open Access) journals	Likely to run out by the end of 2025, no exact date is available yet.
Elsevier	APC QUOTA IS FULLY USED UP as of 13th September, 2025. This agreement is now closed for the remainder of the year.

*these are very broad projections which will change as the year progresses.

Key updates for 2025

New Open Access Publishing Agreement:
American Society Of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)

The new IReL agreement with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) is effective from April 1, 2025, to December 31, 2027.

This agreement provides current staff and students at participating institutions with access to all ASME journals (from 2000 to current) and all ASME Conference Proceedings (from 2008 to current).

Additionally, it allows authors to publish their articles in eligible ASME journals and Conference Proceedings as open access without paying an article processing charge (APC). More information here.

BMJ - this agreement has now unlimited open access quota.

Institute of Physics (IOP) - the new agreement for 2025-2027 now includes publishing in Gold journals for the first time; OA quota - unlimited.

Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) - this agreement now includes Gold (fully Open Access) RSC journals, and an unlimited APC allocation.

Optica Publishing - the renewed agreement now has unlimited APC quota.

Note for authors submitting to Elsevier and Wiley Gold (Fully Open Access) journals:

Please be aware that both the Elsevier and Wiley Open Access (OA) agreements have limited annual APC (Article Processing Charge) quotas. This means there is a risk that OA funding may no longer be available by the time the article is accepted for publication.

If funding is no longer available at the point of acceptance, the APC will have to be covered through alternative sources.