UK universities and Elsevier have agreed a three-year Read & Publish deal to support the transition to Open Access for UK Research.
This agreement provides both continued ‘read’ access to, and unlimited open access publishing in, Elsevier’s subscription journals. Stirling authors will be able to choose to publish open access at no additional cost to the author.
This agreement is effective until the end of December 2024 and significantly reduces the total sector spend.
Key highlights of the Elsevier Read & Publish agreement
- Continuation of existing read access plus post cancellation rights. University of Stirling students and staff retain access to all current subscribed content.
- Authors who publish under this agreement can:
- Publish their peer-reviewed research open access in hybrid journals, at no charge to the author.
- Publish their peer-reviewed research in fully gold open access journals at a 15% discount on the list price APC.
- Journals covered are: Elsevier’s Core Hybrid titles plus Cell Press and The Lancet titles.
- Authors must be the submitting corresponding author affiliated with the University of Stirling, and the articles must have an acceptance date between 1st January 2022 and 31st December 2024.
- There will be a cap on price increases for open access publishing in Elsevier’s portfolio of fully open access titles.
- The Agreement is a substantial reduction on our combined Read and Publish spend in 2021.
Since the Agreement runs from the start of 2022, Elsevier will contact Stirling authors who published in their subscription journals earlier this year and offer to convert these articles to Open Access for free. Elsevier will also be refunding Open Access funds Stirling spent earlier in 2022 that are now covered by the Agreement.
The Agreement is the result of a challenging two year negotiation process, coordinated by Jisc, who worked collectively and in partnership with the UK HE sector to achieve not only the world’s largest Open Access agreement, but one that is unique in the level of savings realised and in the Open Access coverage achieved.
Alongside other Open Access publisher agreements, this will mean that around 80% of UK research output can be published Open Access (versus a global average of 30%). Benchmarked against agreements achieved in other countries, the UK Elsevier agreement is the only agreement to provide cost reductions at this level, whilst enabling unlimited Open Access publishing in Elsevier’s subscription journals including the Cell Press and Lancet titles.
The Elsevier Agreement is one of a number of Open Access agreements the University is a member of: see our full list of Publisher Memberships and Transformative Arrangements page.
Clare Allan
Senior Research Librarian