Open Access @ UCC: IReL Open Access Agreements @UCC

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.   

Please note that you can make your work open access by simply sending your author's accepted manuscript to CORA , our institutional repository.  This also satisfies UCC's open access to publications policy.

In order to be eligible, the corresponding author must be a current member of staff, or a current student.

To avail of IReL Open Access agreements it is essential that corresponding authors:

• identify their organisation as ‘University College Cork'
• use a UCC email address: @ucc.ie OR @tyndall.ie OR @umail.ucc.ie OR @cs.ucc.ie

Please Note: For a number of the agreements there is a limited annual quota of article processing charges (APCs) available to the consortium. For those agreements, once the maximum article allowance is reached, authors will not be offered the option to publish open access at no cost, as the eligibility recognition will be switched off for articles accepted for publication after that point. For further details please see the individual agreement pages.

Please click on the publisher link below to find full details of the IReL Open Access Agreements .  Please note that each deal is slightly different (quotas, dates, types of journals, types of articles, etc), and you should check the details of the deal you wish to use in advance of submitting your article.  

The full list of titles covered is available here. If a journal title is not on this list, it is not covered. This list can and does change when deals are renegotiated: just because a journal was previously covered, does not mean that it still is.  

Please bear in mind that to avail of these deals: 

• You must be the corresponding author. 

• You must use your UCC affiliation and email address. 

• You must be a current staff member or student of UCC at time of acceptance. 

Please be advised that: 

• These deals run on the calendar year - i.e. January to December. Submissions and accepted articles from previous years will not be covered by new year deals (e.g. article accepted in October while publisher quotas are exhausted will not be covered by following year quotas).

• This is not the only way to make your work Open Access. Sending your author's accepted manuscript to CORA , our institutional repository, satisfies UCC's open access to publications policy.

• Not all journals are equal in Open Access - some titles are Hybrid journals which you may not be allowed to use your grant funds to publish in (e.g., SFI does not allow it).  You can check their status on the in the funder links in this guide or by searching the journal policies on SherpaRomeo. 

• You can check the Directory of Open Access Journals for Diamond Open Access journals (no cost to author or reader). This is a useful directory.

• Outside of the IReL negotiated APCs, UCC Library has no funding to support the support the payment of APCs in any other way.