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Collection updates

The objective of this resource is to inform the UNSW community of changes to the Library Collection and open access publishing agreements in which the University participates.

ScienceDirect Open Access Publishing Agreement

Agreement duration: The UNSW agreement is from 1st January 2023 - 31st December 2025 or until the annual publication cap is reached.

Summary: ScienceDirect journals are part of Elsevier, a global analytics company. ScienceDirect journals are focussed on the medical, scientific and technical disciplines.

Titles included: 2024 ScienceDirect title list. All hybrid journals included. Journals that transfer from hybrid to gold during the term of the agreement will be eligible for publishing under the quota if they were hybrid journals at the start of the agreement date. 

Title restrictions: Fully open access journals continue to be excluded from the agreement and author-facing APCs still apply, as well as The Lancet collection (10 titles) and Hybrid Cell Press titles. A 15% discount on APCs is available.

Information for authors: UNSW corresponding authors must use their UNSW institutional email address (name@unsw.edu.au) to be eligible under this agreement. This agreement allows researchers to publish open access under a CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND licence. There may be additional page charges that remain payable by the corresponding author. There is a 15% discount on core hybrid or gold APCs for articles outside of this agreement. There is nothing additional for the corresponding author to do. The 15% discount will appear at the acceptance stage of the author journey and will be clearly shown on the invoice to the author. For journal response times between submission and acceptance you should check the specific journal guidelines for accurate information.

Eligible article types: Research articles (full length), review articles, case reports, practice guidelines and replication studies. Other article types such as brief articles and short communications are excluded.

Acceptance date: Eligible articles that have an acceptance date during the term of this agreement 1st January 2023 - 31st December 2025. Articles accepted before the start of this agreement or were not part of the restricted title list in place till 15 June 2023 are not eligible.

Number of included articles: This is a capped agreement. In 2024 the number of articles is limited to 10,440 (75% of 2021 publishing output of participating institutions).

How to submit your article for open access publishing:

  1. The UNSW corresponding author should follow the usual article submission process via the journal's homepage.

  2. On acceptance of the article, the publisher will ask the corresponding author to complete a form (publishing agreement).

  3. On acceptance of the manuscript, the payment system will allow UNSW corresponding authors to choose UNSW as their institution and remove the open access fee. Articles from authors at participating institutions will be published under a CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND licence.

  4. To comply with the Open Access policy the UNSW corresponding author will need to retain the rights to either the Published Version of Record or Author Accepted Manuscript, and deposit into UNSWorks using a CC-BY licence. 

Corresponding authors should not use personal email addresses (e.g. Hotmail, Gmail) or email addresses affiliated with other organisations, research centres or institutes. Otherwise they may be ineligible under the terms of this agreement.

For any queries about this open access publishing agreement please use this short form.

Tags: open access publishing, scholarly publishing, transformative agreement