Since 2025, IReL has been promoting and coordinating members’ supports for Diamond open access publishing. Diamond open access means OA without any barriers to participation: the content is freely available to anyone to read or reuse, and authors anywhere are free to publish their works without publication charges or needing to be eligible for OA publishing agreements.
IReL already funds support for OA without barriers (such as with our Annual Reviews Subscribe to Open agreement) and infrastructure which enables the open access (such as the Directory of Open Access Journals). With our Diamond OA programme, IReL helps its member libraries to dedicate part of their collections budget to OA publishing. While member libraries fund this, IReL centralises this support by managing promotion, contracts and payments on their behalf.
For 2026, we are pleased to announce that the following libraries have agreed to join our Diamond OA programme:
- University of Limerick is supporting Central European University Press’s participation in the Opening the Future initiative for three years (2026-2028), funding OA book publication and allowing UL access to selected CEU closed content.
- Institute of Art, Design + Technology, Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin have joined the Open Book Collective’s ScholarLed Package, a consortium of six academic-led, non-profit, born open access book publishers, for one year (2026).