The University of Bologna has joined the national CARE-CRUI agreement signed with Elsevier. This transformative agreement covers the subscription fees for accessing the Freedom collection, the University of Bologna's collection and the Cell Press and Clinics journals subscribed by the University, as well as the fees for publishing Open Access in the hybrid journals included in the subscribed collections, in a wide range of full Open Access journals and in all hybrid journals that will be converted to Open Access during the term of the agreement. Therefore, authors can publish Open Access at no additional costs.

 

SUMMARY SHEET FOR PUBLICATION

 

Agreement duration: 2023-2027. Activated in July 2023. 

Open Access publishing obligation: No.

Requirements for covering ppublishing costs: elegibility of the corresponding author (see the dedicated FAQ), journal and article type.

List of the eligible journals: 2024 list [.xlsx 103 KB] (see the dedicated FAQ).

Types of eligible articles: Original Papers (Full-length Articles), Review Articles, Case Reports and, from 2025, Short Communications.

Available fund: limited annual national fund for 2023-2024; from 2024 unlimited fund for hybrid journals, for full Open Access journals a renegotiation between the parties is envisaged.

Licence: see the dedicated FAQ. 

Self-archiving mode (Green OA): authors can deposit the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) (post-print) version of their articles in the institutional repository or publish it on their personal websites. The publication will be freely accessible after a 12-month embargo period.

 

FURTHER INFORMATION 

Which authors may be eligible?

Only corresponding authors already affiliated with the University of Bologna on the date the article is accepted are eligible, including academics with fixed-term contracts such as PhD students, research fellows, fixed-term assistant professors, specialisation school students, etc.

In such cases, authors must submit their contributions via their institutional email address (i.e.: name.surname@unibo.it or name.surname@studio.unibo.it).

Elsevier provides that for an article there can be only one corresponding author. Once the article has been accepted by the publisher, the agreement provides that the name of the corresponding author cannot be modified, except in case of material errors and with the prior authorization of the CRUI.

Which are the eligible journals?

Authors can publish in the hybrid journals included in the Freedom collection and in the "Unibo collection"; authors may also publish in the Cell Press journals subscribed by the University of Bologna, in all hybrid journals that will be converted to Open Access during the term of the agreement and in a wide selection of full Open Access journals, which can be accessed via ScienceDirect.

Here is the list [.xlsx 108 KB] of the hybrid journals eligible in 2024.

What happens if the annual national fund is exhausted?

For the two-year period 2023-2024, the contract covers the Open Access publication of a limited number of articles.

The costs for publishing new articles will be charged to the authors.

In case the annual fund is exhausted, the publisher inhibits on its platform the possibility of requesting the coverage of the Open Access publishing costs through the transformative agreement, no longer showing the University of Bologna in the list of the institutions that have an agreement of this type.

At the beginning of the following year, the new annual coverage will be activated and authors will be able to publish again as Open Access, benefitting from the agreement cost coverage; the new annual fund, however, can be used only for the articles accepted in the year to which the fund refers, that is, not for the articles accepted the previous year.

Under what kind of licence will articles be published?

The standard licence is CC BY. The author may, however, opt for a CC BY-NC-ND licence.

Authors retain all rights relating to their articles, which may be deposited in the University of Bologna institutional repository (IRIS) and published on the authors’ personal websites. Open Access is granted right after the publication without any embargo period.

When will the article be published Open Access?

Once the corresponding author has completed the post-acceptance procedure and opted for the Open Access mode, the article will be published on the Science Direct platform in the next 24 hours.

At the same time, the University of Bologna will verify the author’s affiliation with the University.

Which costs are excluded from the coverage of the agreement?

Any other publishing fees (i.e.: submission fees, color pages, overlength pages fees etc.) are not covered by the agreement.

Where can I find more information about the agreement?