The transitional offer provides unlimited open access publishing to UK authors in Elsevier's hybrid journals including the Cell Press and Lancet titles and delivers a 15% reduction on contracted and direct subscription expenditure with Elsevier.

The fully gold proposal is entirely opt in and provides a 15% reduction on all article processing charges (APCs), flexible payment options and a price cap on annual increases to APCs paid by UK institutions. Please contact Elsevier to opt into the full gold proposal.

For read access, the proposal takes each institution's current subscriptions and applies the reduction to this amount; it does not extend read access rights. Read access is provided to all titles within the collection subscribed to by an institution in that subscription year.

For example, a Freedom Collection subscriber would continue to access all Freedom Collection titles (inclusive of the Cell Press and Lancet titles that currently sit within the Freedom Collection) for the lifetime of the agreement. For any titles that sit outside the Freedom Collection for which the institution does not subscribe to, the institution will have the option to publish OA but not read. Archive rights will be retained to all subscribed titles.

Please find the Workflow documents here in the secure filestore:

• Publishing options: Jisc institution associated corresponding authors - Hybrid journals
• Publishing options: JISC institution affiliated corresponding authors: Author receives 15% discount & invoices the institution/funder of their choice
• Elsevier Open Access Platform Increasing visibility of ageing APCs
• Elsevier Open Access Platform Undo a Rejection Overview guide
• Workflow FAQs
• Elsevier Open Access Platform Unlimited APC agreements Overview guide

If you do not have access, please email licensing@jisc.ac.uk

Agreement extended for one year in 2025 as provided by the contract and agreed by the sector in the June 2024 consultation.

Publisher selection policy

The transitional offer provides unlimited open access publishing to UK authors in Elsevier's Core hybrid journals, Cell Press and The Lancet journals and delivers a 15% reduction on contracted and direct subscription expenditure with Elsevier.

The fully gold open access journals proposal is entirely opt in and provides a 15% reduction on all APCs, flexible payment options and a price cap on APCs paid by UK institutions.

For read access, the proposal takes each institution's current contracted subscriptions and applies the reduction to this amount; it does not extend read access rights. Institutions have received their quotations via the secure area. Read access is provided to all titles within the collection subscribed to by an institution in that subscription year.

For example, a Freedom Collection subscriber would continue to access all Freedom Collection titles (inclusive of the Cell Press and Lancet titles that currently sit within the Freedom Collection) for the lifetime of the agreement. For any titles that sit outside the Freedom Collection for which the institution does not subscribe to, the institution will have the option to publish OA3 but not read. Archive rights will be retained to all subscribed titles. 

The fully open access offer provides the following: 

• 15% discount on list price APCs across all fully OA titles including Core gold, Cell Press and The Lancet

• 2.7% cap on APC annual increases where title is five years +. For titles younger than five years no APC cap applicable, given the immature nature of APC pricing and introductory discounts and offers already in place

• Subscription (hybrid) titles that "flip" to OA over the lifetime of the agreement will continue to be treated as hybrid and benefit from OA publishing

• Payment flexibility - each institution may opt for one of the following payment options:

  1. Drawdown against an open Purchase Order billed quarterly
  2. Pre-payment with carry over
  3. Pay as you go

While possible to accommodate all three options, this is administratively complex, and Elsevier has requested that changes to schemes are not made during the agreement.

Subscribed Titles

On payment of the Content Fee, Institutions shall have access to the full-text of all articles from Subscribed Titles published and paid for during the respective subscription year of this Agreement and previous licences from the beginning of the year the subscription started, plus, without additional charge, the full-text of all articles from Subscribed Titles published during the four (4) years previous to the year in which the subscription commenced.

On payment of the Content Fee Institutions which entered into an IDEAL licence for the 1993 subscription year shall have for each subscription year without any additional charge electronic access via ScienceDirect to twenty five (25) calendar years (building from 1 January 2017 plus a backfile of the twenty (20) previous years back to 1 January 1993) of full text of all articles from the journal titles subscribed to and accessible electronically from the IDEAL® platform prior to the beginning of 2017 and previous licences. The same principle (access from the beginning of the term of a previous licence for IDEAL plus a backfile of accrued backfile years without any additional charge) shall apply to Institutions that entered into new or extended their previous licence for IDEAL to subscription years after 1993.

The Content Fee shall also include (without any additional charge) electronic access to any cancelled journal titles in ScienceDirect subscribed to and paid for by an Institution during the subscription period of the current licence (covering the 2017-2021 subscription years) and during the subscription periods of previous licences.

Institutions shall also have access to the full-text of non-subscribed titles.