LibGuides: Open Access Publishing: Home

Introduction to Open Access

Bring your Research into the OPEN

Open access (OA) is an international movement to make research publications freely available in order to stimulate further research. Any person who can connect to the Internet can access OA material freely.

By making your work Open Access you maximise the impact of your work as the potential readership is far greater than that for publications where the full-text is restricted to subscribers only.

Open access publications go through the same peer review process as non-open access publications. Open access does not interfere with a decision to exploit results commercially, e.g. through patenting.

National Principles for Open Access Policy Statement, Ireland (2012)

The principles driving the Open Access Policy statement are that the outputs from publicly-funded research should be publicly available to researchers and to potential users in education, business, charitable and public sectors, and to the general public.

Open Access using publishing agreements

The Glucksman Library supports open access through a variety of channels including the Research Repository. In order to accelerate the transition towards full open access, the Library (along with the Irish Research eLibrary (IReL)) is also actively involved in negotiating open access agreements with a growing number of scholarly publishers.

Read and publish deals (also known as "transformative deals") have evolved as a result of changes in the open access landscape. In particular, these changes have been brought about by Plan S. Read and publish deals are blanket agreements with academic publishers that cover both the subscription to the journal (the "read" aspect), and the open access publishing cost (the "publish" aspect). These deals therefore allow authors from the University of Limerick to publish gold open access at no extra cost, regardless of whether their work is funded.

What Journals are covered

This google doc is updated regularly with all the journal titles covered by this agreement. Columns G & H will be updated if a fund is due to run out before the year end. Approximately 11,000 journals are covered by this agreement from the publishers listed below.

Step by step instructions on how to publish using these agreements.

Check the google doc to ensure your journal is covered by an agreement. Pay attention to columns G & H to ensure we still have available budget with the publisher
Using your UL email address and affiliation submit as normal to your Journal
Once your article has been accepted you will be contacted by the publisher alerting you to the Open Access agreement and asking you to choose Open Access*
The library will then be sent a notification that you have applied for funding.
As long as you are a current Student or Staff member of UL and we have available budget we will approve the request.

* If at this point the publisher looks to send you an invoice. Please contact the library at libinfo@ul.ie and provide a screenshot of the communication from the publisher.

Which publishers are covered?

The list below details the publishing agreements and arrangements currently available through UL Library