IReL and Open Access: Open Access Agreements

IReL, the Irish Research eLibrary is a nationally funded electronic research library. IReL also seeks to secure open access agreements with publishers.

What is available? IReL delivers quality peer-reviewed online research publications - journals, databases, eBook collections. All of the IReL resources are available through UCC Library's Databases pages.

You can find a full listing of IReL resources here.

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 note that several of the OA agreements with limited quotas have been fully used for 2024.

UCC has several agreements with publishers through IReL that allow UCC corresponding authors to have articles made open access immediately with the publisher without payment of a further Article Processing Charge (APC).

The tabs in the publishers box below detail the current agreements in place and information on eligibility and conditions, and an IReL spreadsheet listing all the journals involved is available:

• Most of the agreements have a limit on the number of APCs that can be granted, so acceptance cannot be guaranteed.
• Researchers are advised to include Open Access charges wherever possible in any funding applications.  Outside of these agreements, UCC has no central fund to support paying individual Article Processing Charges (APCs). 
• The corresponding author must be a current staff member or student at UCC at the time an article is accepted for publication.
• UCC affiliation should be used on the paper.

See the full list of all eligible journals under the current IReL Agreements: http://bit.ly/irelOAjournals

IReL has negotiated Open Access agreements with the following publishers (click on each for full details). 
IReL has also produced a master list of journal titles covered by the agreements: http://bit.ly/irelOAjournals

Please check the individual publisher pages for full and up-to-date details.

Please note that the Elsevier/Science Direct allocation of APCs has been used up for 2024.  (14.10.24)

For queries about Open Access agreements and IReL resources, please contact:

• LibraryAPCs@ucc.ie

For more general queries about Open Access:

• Contact: cora@ucc.ie 
• See: Open Access @ UCC guide