IEEE Reaches a Transformative Open Access Read and Publish Agreement with Finnish Consortium FinELib

Piscataway, N.J. – 24 August 2021 –  IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, and FinELib, a consortium of Finnish universities, universities of applied sciences, research institutes, and public libraries, have entered an Open Access Read and Publish agreement.  

With this new agreement, researchers and other users at the participating institutions will be able to access IEEE journals, conferences, and standards via the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. The agreement also grants affiliated corresponding authors the opportunity to publish their work open access. Under the terms of the three-year agreement, the costs of accessing subscription content and the article processing charges (APCs) required to publish open access are covered by the license fees paid by consortium members, making the process easier and more convenient for authors.

Participating members of the FinELib consortium will have:

• Open access publishing rights in over 160 hybrid IEEE journals and all IEEE fully open access journals, making articles instantly available and free to read by the general public
  
• Publication of all open access IEEE journal articles with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license unless otherwise requested by the author
  
• Read access rights to peer-reviewed journals, access to approximately 200,000 new conference papers added each year, as well as IEEE standards (totaling more than 4.8 million articles overall, including nearly 275,000 new articles in 2020 alone)

Aria Tuuliniemi, Head of Services at FinELib, says “We are pleased that FinELib can now offer researchers at the participating institutions the option to publish open access with IEEE at no additional charge and in compliance with Plan S and Finnish national OA policies. We look forward to collaborating with IEEE to provide smoother processes to our members and authors.”

“IEEE is proud to announce this new pilot OA model agreement with FinELib,” said Karen Hawkins, IEEE Chief Marketing Officer. “With this agreement, Finnish researchers now have a sustainable means to publish the results of their research in IEEE's leading open access and hybrid publications while maintaining access to over five million documents of published research in IEEE Xplore. By offering this pilot agreement, IEEE has an opportunity to test a model that we can offer more broadly if it proves to successfully and sustainably meet the needs of our readers and authors. IEEE is committed to exposing vital research to the global community and to making the publication experience for the research community in Finland and across the globe as easy as possible in the journals on which the scientific and engineering community relies.”

To learn more about the IEEE open access options for authors and institutions, please visit open.ieee.org.

About IEEE

A not-for-profit organization, IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. Through its highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, professional and educational activities, IEEE is the trusted voice in a wide variety of areas ranging from electrical engineering, aerospace systems, telecommunications and computer science to biomedical engineering, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. IEEE has expanded its open access program and launched many new fully open access titles in fields such as computing, telecommunications, biomedical engineering, nanotechnology and more. Learn more.

About FinELib

FinELib is a consortium of Finnish higher education institutions, research institutes, and public libraries. We negotiate e-resource license agreements for the Finnish scholarly community and are committed to achieving full and immediate open access in line with Finland’s OA policy. We currently have multiple transformative agreements in place, allowing Finnish authors to publish their research OA in thousands of journals. More information: https://finelib.fi/.