The University of Bologna has joined the national CARE-CRUI agreement signed with IEEE. This transformative agreement covers both the subscription fees for accessing the resources included in the IEL-IEEE Electronic Library database (journals, conference proceedings, standards) and the fees for publishing Open Access in the hybrid journals and in the 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: 2025-2027. Activated in November 2025. 

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

List of the eligible journals: 2025 [.xlsx 18 KB] list (see the dedicated FAQ).

Types of eligible articles: Original Paper, Original Research, Review Paper.

Available fund: annual limited national fund.

Licence: see the dedicated FAQ.

Self-archiving mode (Green Open Access): 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 and make it available as Open Access.

 

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).

Which are the eligible journals?

Authors can publish in the hybrid journals and in the hybrid journals that will be converted to Open Access during the term of the agreement available on IEEE Xplore.

Here is the list [.xlsx 18 KB] of the eligible journals in 2025.

What happens if the annual national fund is exhausted?

The agreement covers the Open Access publication of a limited number of articles. 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 institutions that have an agreement of this type.

Since the agreement covers articles in hybrid journals, authors can publish their articles under restricted access (without paying any fee) or in Open Access (bearing their own costs).

The agreement covers, however, also articles in hybrid journals which change publishing model becoming full OA: in this case, to proceed it is necessary to pay the fees for publishing in Open Access.

At the beginning of the following year, the new annual coverage will be activated and authors will be able to publish again in 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: articles accepted during the previous year can't be published in Open Access with the new coverage.

Under which 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?

The article will be published once the University of Bologna has verified the author’s affiliation with the University and has given its approval.

Which costs are excluded from the coverage of the agreement?

Any other publication 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 and the publishing workflow?

  • For further information, please contact the Approval Manager of the University of Bologna.