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Open Access Publishing: Royal Society of Chemistry

The Glucksman Library's guide to assist researchers to publish their work Open Access

Agreement details

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

Eligible articles accepted for publication in January or February 2022 (before this agreement was announced): authors will be invited by RSC have the article included in the agreement.

These limited quotas will cover a projected 50%-60% of participating members output per year. Author who are not offered OA under this agreement have other options for making their works open access: either uploading a copy of your manuscript to your institution’s institutional repository (see RSC’s Green OA policy), or paying an APC to make the published version OA.

Journals Included

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.

Author Information

For your article submission to be included under the agreement, you must be the corresponding author and affiliated with UL 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.

Author affiliations

Corresponding authors must be a current staff member or student of UL.  

In the article submission process you must correctly identify your institution.

You should use your UL email address when submitting your article. 

If your manuscript is accepted for publication, the publisher will give you the opportunity to make your article Open Access and apply a Creative Commons license. The publisher will then contact the participating institution to confirm your eligibility under the agreement.