Following long-running negotiations between the publisher Elsevier and JISC, we received news toward the end of March that an agreement had been reached. The agreement is designed to both provide University Libraries with a more sustainable financial framework for funding subscription and open access costs, and to make it much more straight forward for authors to publish via the ‘Gold’ Open Access route. In the process this should make it easier for authors comply with Open Access funder requirements, such as those recently introduced by UKRI for UK Research Council and Innovate UK funded authors.
The agreement covers over 2,000 ‘hybrid’ journal titles, including some Cell Press titles and journals in the Lancet portfolio.
In order to take advantage of the agreement, the corresponding author on a research paper will need to be affiliated to a University, such as Coventry University, which is participating in the agreement. This is common to the other publisher open access agreements we are signed up to where eligibility is assessed based on the corresponding author affiliation.
Under the Elsevier agreement, authors will be notified upon acceptance by the publisher that they can publish Open Access without any additional costs being incurred. Authors will get asked to select a Creative Commons licence for the article to be published under, we would ask that a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) be selected to ensure compliance with major research funder conditions such as UKRI and to maximise the benefits of publishing via the 'Gold' Open Access route.
The details then get passed on to the Library who provide final confirmation of approval via a publisher dashboard.
Fully open access journals published by Elsevier, those which publish exclusively open access content requiring payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC) by authors to facilitate publication, are not included in the agreement. Open Access costs may apply to authors wishing to publish in fully open access Elsevier titles. UKRI funded researchers can make an application to cover such costs through the UKRI Block Grant, while unfunded authors who are based in Research Centres can apply to the University Open Access fund. Relevant terms and conditions in relation to these funds are available on our Libguide. The form to make an application for Open Access funding via either the UKRI Block Grant or University Open Access fund is available here.
With the Elsevier agreement secured, we are now signed up to ‘Read & Publish’ agreements with four of the five publishers whom Coventry University have most frequently published with. This is according to the data in our November 2021 Blog Post. These agreements each have slightly different terms and conditions in terms of whether they include ‘open access’ and ‘hybrid’ journals and whether there is a ‘cap’ in terms of the number of articles which can be published under them. For details about how each agreement operates in practice, please see this section of our LibGuide.
Any queries in relation to these agreements or any requests for our team to provide an information session for your Research Centre or Academic Department, can be sent to us at: oa.lib@coventry.ac.uk.
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