The IReL Negotiation Group has been busy finalising the renewal of several of our open access (OA) agreements and putting new OA agreements in place for 2025. All of our OA agreements are negotiated in line with our principles for transformative agreements:
- American Physical Society
- ASME
- IOP Publishing
- Optica Publishing Group
- Rockefeller University Press
- Royal Society of Chemistry
- Springer Nature (now completed)
- Wiley
We anticipate that not all of them will be signed by close of business before the Christmas season. Our expectations in the new year are that:
- Publishers will allow uninterrupted read access to subscription content to continue until the new agreements are signed.
- The terms of authors’ eligibility for OA will not change from our preceding agreements with the publishers.
- There may be temporary interruptions in publishers offering IReL-funded OA to accepted authors. If this arises, we expect publishers to retrospectively offer OA to eligible articles after the agreements are signed.
- We will update this post and the relevant irel.ie pages for these deals as the agreements are signed.
PLOS: we are currently unable to confirm if there will be a new publishing agreement with PLOS from 2025.
American Psychological Association: our 2022-2024 OA publishing agreement with APA will not be renewed, so from 1 Jan 2025 authors will not be offered IReL-funded OA when their articles are accepted for publication. This is because a core requirement for IReL’s transformative agreements is that they “reduce or control the total cost of OA publishing and subscription access per publisher”, something we have been unable to reach agreement with APA on. Our new agreement will be for access to APA’s databases only. Further information.