Royal Society of Chemistry

Introduction: this agreement gives current staff and students at participating institutions:

  • Access to:
  • The ability to make articles accepted for publication in all hybrid RSC journals open access, without the author paying an article processing charge (APC). Further details below.

Agreement period: 1 Jan 2022 to 31 Dec 2024

Participating members:

  • Dublin City University
  • Maynooth University
  • Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland
  • Technological University Dublin
  • Trinity College Dublin
  • University College Cork
  • University College Dublin
  • University of Galway
  • University of Limerick

Publisher page: https://www.rsc.org/journals-books-databases/open-access/read-and-publish/ 

OA quota per year

  • 2022: 42 articles. 
  • 2023: 50 articles. As of 6 November, this 2023 allocation is used up. Accepted articles will not be offered IReL-funded OA for the rest of 2023. 
  • 2024: 52 articles

Eligible articles accepted for publication in January or February 2022 (before this agreement was announced): authors will be invited by RSC have the article included in the agreement. 

These limited quotas will cover a projected 50%-60% of participating members output per year. Author who are not offered OA under this agreement have other options for making their works open access: either uploading a copy of your manuscript to your institution’s institutional repository (see RSC’s Green OA policy), or paying an APC to make the published version OA

Journals eligible for OA publishing:

  • any of the journals RSC class as hybrid (all journals except gold open access journals and Chemistry Education Research and Practice (CERP), which are already free to access)
  • also see the list of eligible journals in all of IReL’s 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 the article is accepted for publication. The corresponding author must ensure their correct affiliation details are known to the publisher at this time. 

Eligible article types: all research articles and review papers. 

OA publishing license: either a CC-BY 3.0  or a CC BY-NC 3.0 license, granting the publisher non-exclusive right of use. Authors of open access articles retain copyright to the article. The licence versions will move to version 4.0 during 2022.

Further information: