Open Access Publishing Agreements: Royal Society of Chemistry

UPDATE: 2024

This limited quota is now fully used up. Eligible authors of articles accepted for publication will not be offered IReL-funded OA for the rest of 2024.

This agreement gives current staff and students:

• Access to current content from a fixed list of 27 RSC journals.
• The ability to make articles accepted for publication in all hybrid RSC journals open access, without the author paying an article processing charge (APC).

Agreement period: 1 Jan 2022 to 31 Dec 2024

OA quota per year (shared across participating institutions):

• 2022: 42 articles
• 2023: 50 articles
• 2024: 52 articles

UPDATE (6th December): IReL is currently in negotiations with the publisher for the new agreement from 2025:
This page will be updated once negotiations are finalised and a new agreement is in place.

Any of the journals RSC class as hybrid (all journals except gold open access journals and Chemistry Education Research and Practice (CERP), which are already free to access).

Also see the list of eligible journals in all of IReL’s open access agreements.

For your article submission to be included under the agreement, you must be the corresponding author and affiliated with UCD at the time the article is accepted for publication. The corresponding author must ensure their correct affiliation details are known to the publisher at this time.

Eligibility is based on article acceptance date.

OA publishing license: either a CC-BY 3.0  or a CC BY-NC 3.0 license, granting the publisher non-exclusive right of use. Authors of open access articles retain copyright to the article. The licence versions will move to version 4.0 during 2022.

Information on IReL website.