Open Access Publishing: Home

All major Irish and European funders require some form of Open Access to research outputs that have been funded by the research grants.

Listed are some of the leading Irish funder's Open Access policies...

• Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)
• Irish Research Council (IRC)
• Health Research Board (HRB)
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

And some major European funders…

• European Commission Guidelines on Open Access to Scientific Publications and Research Data in Horizon 2020
• European Research Council (ERC) Open Access Guidelines for researchers funded by the ERC

All funder's Open Access policies can be queried using the "Sherpa/Juliet" service. 

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.

1. 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
2. Using your UL email address and affiliation submit as normal to your Journal
3. 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*
4. The library will then be sent a notification that you have applied for funding.
5. 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?

UPDATE January 2025

The IReL Negotiation Group has been busy finalising the renewal of several of our open access (OA) agreements and putting new OA agreements in place for 2025. All of our OA agreements are negotiated in line with our principles for transformative agreements:

• American Physical Society
• ASME
• IOP Publishing
• Optica Publishing Group
• Rockefeller University Press
• Royal Society of Chemistry
• Springer Nature (now completed)
• Wiley
   

We anticipate that not all of them will be signed by close of business before the Christmas season.  Our expectations in the new year are that:

• Publishers will allow uninterrupted read access to subscription content to continue until the new agreements are signed.
• The terms of authors’ eligibility for OA will not change from our preceding agreements with the publishers.
• There may be temporary interruptions in publishers offering IReL-funded OA to accepted authors. If this arises, we expect publishers to retrospectively offer OA to eligible articles after the agreements are signed.
• We will update this post and the relevant irel.ie pages for these deals as the agreements are signed.
   

PLOS: IReL are currently unable to confirm if there will be a new publishing agreement with PLOS from 2025.

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

• ACM
• American Chemical Society (ACS)
• AIP
• Annual Reviews
• BMJ
• Cambridge University Press
• Cell Press (Elsevier)
• Company of Biologists
• Electrochemical Society
• Emerald
• IEEE
• Institute of Physics (IOP)
• Microbiology Society
• Optica Publishing
• Oxford University Press (OUP)
• PLOS Publishing
• Sage
• Science Direct (Elsevier) 
• Springer
• Rockefeller University Press
• Royal Irish Academy
• Royal Society
• Royal Society of Chemistry
• Taylor & Francis
• Wiley*

*Wiley Gold Open Access titles are approved upon submission. Wiley Hybrid titles are approved upon acceptance. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.