The IReL-BMJ agreement (2021-2023) allows eligible corresponding authors in participating institutions to publish original research open access upon publication at no extra cost.
Eligible journals: 28 journals in the BMJ Standard collection. 11 journals must use the CC-BY-NC licence for OA publication unless CC-BY is specifically mandated by funders.
For your article submission to be included under the agreement, you must be the corresponding author and affiliated to 'University College Cork' at the time the article is accepted for publication. In the article submission process you must correctly identify your institution as 'University College Cork'. You must use your UCC email address, and not addresses from other domains. At the time the article is accepted for publication, the corresponding author must be a current staff member or student with a participating institution.
See:
For articles accepted between January 2021 and May 2021: eligible corresponding authors will be contacted by BMJ in mid-May 2021, inviting them to make the article open access retrospectively.
Note: There is a quota of 24 articles per year of the agreement, allocated across the participating institutions on a first-come-first-served basis.
For queries about Open Access agreements and IReL resources, please contact:
For more general queries about Open Access: