Open access is a broad international movement that seeks to grant free and open online access to academic information, such as publications and data. A publication is defined as 'open access' when there are no financial, legal or technical barriers to accessing it - that is to say when anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search for and search within the information, or use it in education or in any other way within the legal agreements.
Through Open Access publishing, research findings can be communicated at speed freely via the web with no or limited license restrictions, thereby maximising the impact of a scholar's work as the potential readership is much greater than that for publications where the full-text is restricted to subscribers only.
For queries about Open Access, IReL resources or CORA please contact:
The Library supports Green Open Access publishing via CORA. This Green route involves no costs to researchers and enables you to deposit the final manuscript version of your papers in the CORA repository, where they will be fully accessible online at no cost to the reader.
It is important to remember that most publishers will only permit authors to post the accepted manuscript version of a publication to the repository. The accepted version is the final draft, after peer review, which incorporates any peer review changes, but does not have the publisher's formatting, typesetting or logos.
If you are a UCC researcher, you can send your publication to CORA from your IRIS profile. Alternatively, you can email your publication to cora@ucc.ie and we will upload it for you.
See: CORA - Cork Open Research Archive (UCC's Open Access Repository)
Queries: cora@ucc.ie
UCC, via IReL have secured a number of 'Transformative Agreements' with publishers that typically allow corresponding authors from eligible institutions to publish their articles open access immediately on publication. The Article Publishing Charges (APCs) have been prepaid for a large number of articles with a wide range of publishers.
To confirm if your proposed journal is eligible for a funded APC please check the link here or email libraryapcs@ucc.ie. For more information check the IReL agreement page.
WHAT ARE APCs? (Article Processing Charges?)
An Article Processing Charge (APC) is a one-off payment to publishers in gold or hybrid Open Access journals. Paying this fee means that your research is open access at point of publication and is available to anyone with an internet connection on the publishers' website.
The APC is paid by either the author, the funder, the institution, or the employer. The fee is payable when your manuscript is accepted, but before it is published.
APC costs vary between publishers, the average cost of an APC is approx. €2,000 - €5,000, but can be as high as €15,000+ per paper.
All current staff and students of UCC have access to the IReL consortium read and publish deals which includes access to a limited number of IReL funded APCs in selected journal titles.
You can also check the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) for Diamond Open Access journals which do not charge Article Processing Charges (APCs).
Paying an APC is not the only way to make your work Open Access as you can make your work open access by simply sending your author's accepted manuscript to CORA , our Institutional Repository. Lodging your Authors Accepted Manuscript (AAM) (also known as post-print and authors final version) into CORA, our institutional repository, enables you to share your publications, open access and also satisfies UCC's open access to publications policy.
Rights Retention is the process whereby the author (the original copyright holder) retains specific rights during the copyright transfer process. Specifically, these rights pertain to making your Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) freely available (open access) under a Creative Commons licence.
Traditionally, when researchers publish their work in academic journals, they transfer copyright to the publisher. This transfer of copyright often means that the author gives up many rights to their own work allowing the publisher to retain rights over the content of the publication and in some cases allowing them charge to access the publication.
Ensure you include a Rights Retention Statement as required by your funder (e.g. SFI, Horizon Europe) when submitting your manuscript to the publisher as this will allow you to retain the right to share the Authors Accepted Manuscript (AAM) version of your article with an open license. More information here.
For more information about any of the agreements and how to avail of IReL funded APCs please contact UCC’s Scholarly Communications Librarian Donna Ó Doibhlin, donna.odoibhlin@ucc.ie or the Open Access Team at libraryapcs@ucc.ie
CORA - UCC's Open Access Repository
Research at THEA - Research@THEA is an open access repository established in 2017 containing research from all the Institutes of Technology.
OpenAIRE - Find over 40m open access publications, open datasets and software from over 18,000 content providers.
Directory of Open Access Journals - An online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
Directory of Open Access Books - A directory of academic peer-reviewed books from many publishers.
OpenDOAR: Directory of Open Access Repositories - Provides access to academic open access repositories from around the world.
OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) - OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open access books and provide services for publishers, libraries, and research funders in the areas of hosting, deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.
