What are read and publish agreements?

A Read-and-Publish agreement is an agreement in which the publisher receives payment for reading and payment for publishing bundled into a single contract. The ‘read’ part of the agreement covers the subscriptions libraries pay so they can access closed material, and the ‘publish’ part covers APCs that authors would have paid to publish their papers as open access. This bundling together brings payment for publishing into a contractual arrangement handled by the library rather than being addressed ad hoc by individual authors who are choosing open access publishing. These agreements are 'transformative' as they seek to re-direct funds previously spent on subscription-based reading to the publishing component, often with a goal of a cost-neutral agreement in comparison with the previous subscription-based reading agreement.

Source

Types of agreements

When you submit your paper as a corresponding author to any of these journals, remember to indicate that UC has a read and publish agreement with them.

Some publishers have a cap on the number of APC-free publications we can provide, which is managed by the CAUL collective for Australian & New Zealand Universities. Use Reports to see how many manuscripts have been approved across the collective so far.

ASME

50% APC discount on all 33 ASME journals

Elsevier

15% APC discount on hybrid/gold articles that are not covered by our agreement

ICE Journals

Authors affiliated with the University of Canterbury receive a 15% discount on APCs. The corresponding author will need to use a Canterbury email address when publishing the article.

MDPI

Authors affiliated with the University of Canterbury receive a 10% discount on the APCs for any paper published in an MDPI journal. More details here. A list of MDPI journals is available here.

Please see UC Library's MDPI statement.

Royal Society of Chemistry

Authors affiliated with the University of Canterbury receive a 15% discount on APCs as part of our Royal Society of Chemistry subscription.  This will be automatically applied upon acceptance of an article where the corresponding author uses their institution’s email domain.

There are also three new journals: EES Catalysis, RSC Sustainability, Industrial Chemistry & Materials and Sustainable Food Technology that will be available from 2023 that will be gold open access and free to publish in until 2025.