IReL APC deals LibGuide

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- €2,500 per paper, up to €11k (SpringerNature). APCs rise in cost year on year, particularly in Hybrid titles. 

As a current staff or student of TU Dublin, you have access to the IReL consortium read and publish deals which cover APCs in selected titles. 

Are APCs equitable?  

The APC-barrier and its effect on stratification in open access publishing. - findings suggest support for the hypothesis that author-facing charges in OA publishing present a barrier to publication and reduce the pool of knowledge that enters the scientific record. 

What is IReL and what are the deals?

IReL is a consortium of Irish research libraries that was established in 2004. IReL provides participating member institutions with access to a wide range of licensed e-resources, open access publishing agreements with over twenty publishers, and open science infrastructure. IReL is based in Maynooth University.

TU Dublin, as a member of the IReL consortium of Irish academic libraries, has entered into several Transformative Open Access Publishing agreements with key scholarly publishers.

Transformative agreements shift the payments away from subscription-based reading towards open access publishing. They ensure that scholarly research outputs are freely available online to all, with no, or limited, licence restrictions at point of publication. 

These agreements allow TU Dublin corresponding authors to publish an agreed number of Open Access articles in the publishers' academic journals without paying Article Processing Charges (APCs). 

Ensure you include any Rights Retention Statement 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 licence.  

Paying an APC is not the only way to make your work Open Access. Lodging your Authors Accepted Manuscript (AAM) (also known as post-print and authors final version) into Arrow, our institutional repository, satisfies TU Dublin’s Open Access policy, and Green Open Access, even if an embargo is applied.  

You can also check the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) for Diamond Open Access journals which do not charge Article Processing Charges (APCs). 

Which journals are included in these deals?

A full list of all the journals included in the IReL agreements can be found here. Please note text at the top of the spreadsheet. 

If a journal does not appear on the list, it is not covered. These agreements can and do change, so ensure that the journal you are submitting to is on the list before you submit.  

Who can avail of these agreements?

Open access publishing agreements can be availed of by all corresponding authors affiliated with TU Dublin at the time the paper is accepted for publication. The corresponding author is the person responsible for manuscript submission and all correspondence/communication during the publication process. 

Please ensure you include your TU Dublin email address and TU Dublin affiliation in the corresponding author details at the time of submission. This ensures that your application reaches our dashboard. 

Please be aware that the length of peer reviewing processes with individual publishers may therefore impact an author’s ability to utilise these OA (Open Access) agreements. Please contact the relevant publisher for further information. 

If you have any questions in relation to any of the open access publishing agreements detailed on this guide, please contact publisherapprovals@tudublin.ie. 

For information about open access more generally, please contact Aisling Coyne, Open Scholarship Librarian, TU Dublin, Park House (aisling.coyne@tudublin.ie).