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.

Key updates for 2025

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.

Elsevier
Approval for APC funding under the OA agreement occurs at the time of article acceptance, provided that funds are still available.

Wiley
Approval is initially given at the time of submission but it is conditional on funding still being available at the time of acceptance. If it is forecasted that the annual quota will be exhausted by then, the OA agreement will not be offered at submission, and the author will need to secure alternative funding.

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)	November/December 2025
American Chemical Society (ACS)	June/July 2025
Springer	October 2025.
Taylor and Francis	July/August 2025.
Wiley - Hybrid journals	Likely to run out by the end of 2025, no exact date is available yet.