The Irish ScienceDirect agreement 2023-2025 was negotiated by representatives from a consortium of Irish universities, institutes of technology and TU Dublin, with assistance from IReL, THEA and the IUA. The agreement provides continued read-access to the Elsevier’s Freedom Collection of journals for the 19 participating institutions (including UL), and also allows corresponding authors from member institutions to publish a proportion of articles (an estimated 71%, equating to 123 articles per year in the case of UL) open access in over two thousand Elsevier journals without any direct publication charges (Source: IReL).
If the allowance is used up, Elsevier’s editorial systems will instead offer corresponding authors the options of:
Corresponding authors with articles accepted once the allocation has been used up will need to either find other sources of funding to pay the APC fee, or (if publishing in a hybrid journal), publish without a fee to subscribers on the publisher site while making a version of your article available through the Institutional Repository.
Publishing volumes and activity will be monitored on an ongoing basis, and the agreement will be reviewed annually with an opportunity for UL Library to provide feedback to Elsevier in order to ensure the agreement is meeting the needs of the UL community.
Approximately 10,000 journals are covered by IReL agreements. IReL have created a google doc that is updated regularly with all the journal titles covered by this agreement
Columns G and H of the linked spreadsheet will also give an indication if a fund is due to run out before the year end and the projected date it will run out.
UL authors will be able to publish on a selection of over 2000 Elsevier journals without article processing charges. See the following link for the full list of titles covered by the agreement:
Each participating institution has been allocated a specific OA allowance each year. The allowance will cover an estimated 71% of articles by eligible authors in the relevant Elsevier journals. For UL, this currently means a total of 84 articles per year. During the first year this number will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. If the allowance is used up, Elsevier’s editorial systems will instead offer corresponding authors the options of:
Data from the process will be reviewed at the end of the first year, and the procedure for open access article allocation may be reviewed at this stage.
When a paper has been submitted on or after January 1st 2020, and is subsequently accepted, the corresponding author will be sent an e-mail with a link to an author publication tool. The tool offers several publishing options. If the author selects Gold Open Access as their preferred option, UL Library will then validate their eligibility, and the article will be published open access on the journal website.
Further information can be found in the following Elsevier presentation:
You can still make your article openly accessible by self-archiving it in ULIR (an embargo may apply depending on the specific journal).
This will fulfil the open access requirements of many funding bodies. For more information on how to deposit your paper see our guide
The ScienceDirect agreement covers articles accepted for publication between January 1st 2023 and December 31st 2025.