IEEE and CRUI Sign Three-Year Transformative Agreement to Accelerate Open Access Publishing in Italy

PISCATAWAY, N.J., 13 September 2022 -- IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, announced today that it has reached an unlimited read and publish open access agreement with the Conferenza dei Rettori delle Università Italiane (CRUI), the association of state and non-state Italian universities, to support authors who choose to publish open access.

Under this new three-year agreement, all researchers from the participating 54 Italian institutions are now able to publish open access articles in approximately 200 leading journals and magazines published by IEEE, making them instantly available and free to read by the public and helping support CRUI’s mission to make their authors’ publications open to the world. Under the terms of the agreement, the costs of both 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 CRUI will have:

• Open access publishing rights in all of IEEE’s hybrid journals and 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 five million articles overall, including over 250,000 new articles added each year)

“In recent years, the Conferenza dei Rettori delle Università Italiane has signed various agreements fostering open access publication by affiliated members. Nevertheless, what makes the collaboration with IEEE significant is the possibility for authors to publish both in hybrid and gold journals at no additional cost and in an unlimited number. This is an extraordinary opportunity for the 54 Italian universities and research institutions reached by this contract, which also grants access to the IEL database,” says Ferruccio Resta, President of the CRUI. “In recent years, IEEE journals have been particularly appreciated by local scholars, with more than 1,300 articles published in 2021 by the agreeing institutions. Expectations are high, and the CRUI is extremely happy to announce this cooperation that contributes to boost the competitiveness of the Italian educational and research system.”

“IEEE is very pleased to have reached this agreement with the research community at the CRUI, which will provide Italian scholars with a wide array of open access publishing options across our highly cited portfolio of journals,” said Karen Hawkins, Chief Marketing Officer at IEEE. “This agreement reinforces IEEE’s commitment to expanding our open science offerings and allows IEEE to share the work of leading researchers with more of the global research community to further scientific and engineering progress.”

To learn more about the IEEE open access options for authors and institutions or to view a list of over 300 institutions that have an open access agreement with IEEE, 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 CRUI
The CRUI is the association of state and non-state Italian universities. Established in 1963 as a private association of Rectors, the Conferenza dei Rettori delle Università Italiane (CRUI) has over time acquired an acknowledged institutional and representative role, as well as a practical capacity to influence the development of the university system through its intense activity of study and experimentation. Within the CRUI, CARE manages, on behalf of universities and research institutions, negotiations with publishers and producers of electronic bibliographic resources. CARE currently negotiates and manages around 50 contracts, both nationally and internationally.

Media contacts:

Monika Stickel
+1 732 562 6027
m.stickel@ieee.org

Francine Tardo
+1 732 465 5865
f.tardo@ieee.org