Elsevier (ScienceDirect) 🔓

Introduction:

The Irish ScienceDirect agreement 2026-2028 gives current staff and students at participating institutions:

  • Read access to Elsevier’s Freedom Collection journals
  • The ability to make articles accepted for publication in participating Hybrid and Gold journals open access without the author paying an article processing charge (APC). Further details below.

Agreement period: 1 Jan 2026 – 31 Dec 2028

Participating members:

  • Atlantic Technological University
  • Dublin City University
  • Dundalk Institute of Technology
  • Institute of Art, Design And Technology
  • Maynooth University
  • Mary Immaculate College
  • Munster Technological university
  • Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland
  • South East Technological University
  • Teagasc (with read access to subscribed journals only)
  • Technological University Dublin
  • Technological University of the Shannon: Midlands Midwest
  • Trinity College Dublin
  • University College Cork
  • University College Dublin
  • University of Galway
  • University of Limerick

Publisher page: https://www.elsevier.com/open-access/agreements/ireland

OA quota:  1,450 articles per year. This is a shared allocation open to all participating members on a first-come-first-served basis.

IMPORTANT:

  • This limited quota is not projected to cover all articles from participating institutions. If the quota runs out in any year, OA funded by this agreement will not be offered to articles accepted for the rest of that year.
  • If the quota runs out, and the article is in a Hybrid journal: the publisher will offer authors the options of a) publishing the article subscription (closed access) with no fee, or b) publishing the article OA by means of the author paying the APC. Authors can continue to make their articles available using the Green open access model, subject to the journal’s policy. See Elsevier’s Sharing and hosting policy FAQ or the Open policy finder database of publishers’ Green OA policies. 
  • If the quota runs out, and the article is in a Gold (fully OA) journal, the author must pay an APC. Before a corresponding author submits, they must ensure that they have the means to pay the APC if required.  

Journals eligible for OA publishing: most Elsevier fully-OA journals and most Elsevier hybrid journals. For further information, search the Elsevier Journal Finder for this agreement, which provides details of the journals included. Also see the list of eligible journals in all IReL open access agreements: http://bit.ly/irelOAjournals

 Eligible authors: 

  • the corresponding author must be a current staff member or student of a participating institution at the time of editorial acceptance. The corresponding author must ensure their correct affiliation details are known to the publisher. 
  • Requests to publish OA under the agreement are subject to approval by participating members. 

Eligible article types: see https://www.elsevier.com/open-access/agreements/ireland for more information. 

OA publishing license: if accepted for publication in the journals included in the Agreement, the corresponding author shall be offered the option of publishing open access under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY or CC-BY-NC-ND). Authors shall retain copyright to the journal article.

Further information:

  • The IReL SD agreement 2026-2028 (coming soon)
  • Details of the agreement on the ESAC registry of transformative agreements (coming soon)
  • Preceding agreement (2023-2025)