CCCU has signed agreements with a selection of academic publishers to enable more researchers at the University to publish their research articles open access. Authors submitting articles for publication in journals that are part of these agreements will have open access fees (usually known as APCs – Article Processing Charges) reduced or waived, depending on the agreement with the publisher.

We have agreements with the following publishers:

• BMJ
• Cambridge University Press
• Elsevier
• Oxford University Press
• SAGE
• Springer
• Taylor and Francis
• Wiley

Please check with the library to find out whether or not you are entitled to full, part or no waiving of costs. This will depend on several factors, including the type of journal and whether or not your research is externally funded. Library and Learning Resources staff will find the information and email it to you within 5 working days.

Full or part costs for eligible open access publishing have been met centrally, arranged by Library and Learning Resources (LLR) via Jisc, the license negotiator for UK higher education. The agreements are known as “transformative”, “transitional”, or “read and publish” agreements, as they contribute to the global open access strategy, to transition academic journals to open access.

The open access costs are part of an overall CCCU payment for subscriptions and publishing.

Several agreements are still in negotiation: we will announce any new agreements on StaffNet.

Who can use the transformative agreements?

CCCU’s transformative agreements cover open access costs in whole or part for:

• research and review papers
• with a CCCU corresponding author who is a full member of staff or student
• in subscription and fully open access journals included in the agreement.

Papers whose corresponding author is an honorary or visiting member of staff cannot generally be covered. This is because of restrictions in the agreements, and therefore the corresponding author should contact their ‘home’ library for further support. To enable papers funded by the UK Research Councils (UKRI), the Wellcome Trust and other funders to be published open access, CCCU authors with relevant funding are encouraged, where appropriate, to act as corresponding author.

Articles that are in “fully gold” journals (journals where all articles in the journal are published open access) and/or not funded by a major external funding body are often only entitled to a discount from the open access cost and not to the waiving of the entire fee.

Things to check

When you submit your article to the publisher, ensure that you are listed, with your CCCU affiliation and CCCU e-mail address, as the corresponding author. This will enable the publisher to identify your paper as eligible to be published open access under the CC BY licence. Please check the publisher list below for specific instructions.

Further information

Please contact library research support if you have any questions about transformative agreements or open access publishing in general.