IReL (Ireland’s Research eLibrary) is the national consortium through which Irish research-performing institutions license electronic journals, databases, and — increasingly — transformative agreements that let researchers publish open access without paying an individual article processing charge out of a grant. It is a different organisation from Ireland’s national research funding agency and from the country’s research-assessment-reform coordinating body, though the three are often mentioned in the same breath because they all shape how Irish researchers publish and get credit for their work. This guide explains what IReL actually does, who its members are, how its transformative agreements work in practice, and how it differs from the other Ireland-focused entities CASRAI covers.
What IReL Is and Who Runs It
IReL was established in 2004 and is hosted and administered by Maynooth University on behalf of the wider Irish higher-education and research sector. It operates as a shared-services consortium: rather than each university, technological university, or research institute negotiating its own subscriptions and open-access deals separately with individual publishers, IReL negotiates centrally and member institutions participate collectively. Its core functions are (1) licensing access to subscription e-resources — journals, databases, and reference works — on behalf of members, (2) negotiating and administering read-and-publish transformative agreements with journal publishers, and (3) supporting open-research infrastructure more broadly.
IReL is funded through Ireland’s higher-education system, drawing support from the Higher Education Authority (HEA), the Irish Universities Association (IUA), and the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science. That funding and governance structure is what allows IReL to negotiate as a single national buyer rather than leaving each institution to negotiate publisher terms on its own — the same collective-bargaining logic behind comparable national consortia elsewhere, such as Sikt in Norway and JUSTICE in Japan.
Member Institutions
IReL’s membership has expanded substantially since 2004 from a small group of founding universities to cover effectively the full breadth of Ireland’s publicly funded research sector. As of its current published membership list, IReL members include:
- Atlantic Technological University
- Dublin City University
- Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS)
- Dundalk Institute of Technology
- Institute of Art, Design + Technology
- Mary Immaculate College
- Maynooth University
- Munster Technological University
- Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland
- South East Technological University
- Teagasc
- Technological University Dublin
- Technological University of the Shannon: Midlands Midwest
- Trinity College Dublin
- University College Cork
- University College Dublin
- University of Galway
- University of Limerick
This list is broader than the membership of Ireland’s CoARA National Chapter, which as of its 2024 launch counted ten universities and three funding bodies — IReL’s remit extends further into the technological-university and research-institute sector because it is a licensing and publishing-agreement consortium open to any qualifying research-performing institution, not a coordinating forum built around signatories to a specific assessment-reform commitment.
How IReL’s Transformative Agreements Work
A transformative agreement bundles a subscription (read) with a right to publish open access (publish) into a single negotiated deal with a publisher, with the explicit goal of shifting a journal’s or publisher’s output from subscription-based to fully open access over time — the negotiation logic that underpins agreements tracked globally through the ESAC Initiative. IReL began signing its own open-access publishing agreements from 2020 and has since built this into more than twenty agreements with publishers, collectively covering upwards of ten thousand journals available to researchers at member institutions.
In practice, this means a corresponding author affiliated with an IReL member institution can typically publish in an eligible journal from a participating publisher with the open-access APC covered under the consortium deal, rather than needing to source a separate publication-cost budget line or pay a fee at the point of acceptance. Eligibility rules vary by agreement — some cover only the corresponding author’s institutional affiliation, some cap the number of articles or apply to specific journal collections within a publisher’s portfolio — so authors should check the specific agreement terms published on IReL’s own agreements pages before assuming a given journal is covered. This is the same operational pattern described in CASRAI’s general guide to how read-and-publish agreements work for authors, applied at the scale of Ireland’s national consortium rather than a single institution.
The Move Toward 100% Open Access by 2030
IReL has stated an explicit target of achieving 100% open access to Irish research publications by 2030, using transformative agreements as the primary mechanism for shifting subscription spend toward open-access publishing rather than treating the two as separate budget lines. This mirrors the trajectory intended by the transformative-agreement model generally — and by frameworks like Plan S and Horizon Europe’s Article 39 open-access requirement, both of which apply directly to many IReL-member researchers holding EU or Irish public funding. Researchers weighing open-access routes more broadly may also find CASRAI’s comparison of gold, green, diamond, and hybrid open access useful context for where transformative agreements fit relative to other OA models.
IReL, Research Ireland, and CoARA Ireland: Three Different Organisations
These three names are frequently mentioned together in Irish research-policy contexts, but they do distinct jobs and researchers and research offices should not conflate them:
- IReL is a library-and-publishing consortium. It licenses journal and database access and negotiates transformative open-access publishing agreements on behalf of member institutions. It is hosted by Maynooth University and funded through the HEA, IUA, and the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science.
- Research Ireland (Taighde Éireann) is Ireland’s national research funding agency, formed from the 2024 merger of Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council. It funds research projects and researcher careers; it does not negotiate journal-subscription or publishing deals.
- CoARA National Chapter Ireland is a coordinating forum for Irish signatories to the CoARA Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment — a DORA-aligned commitment about how research and researchers are evaluated for hiring, promotion, and funding decisions. It has no role in licensing content or negotiating publishing agreements; its work concerns assessment criteria, not access or publication economics.
In short: IReL is about paying for and gaining access to publish and read research; Research Ireland is about funding the research itself; CoARA Ireland is about how that research and the people who produce it get evaluated. A given Irish university is typically a member of all three, but the three serve entirely separate functions and are governed separately.
How IReL Compares to Other National Library Consortia
IReL is one of a growing number of national or regional consortia that centralise transformative-agreement negotiation on behalf of research institutions, rather than leaving individual universities to negotiate separately. Comparable models include Sikt in Norway and JUSTICE in Japan, both of which negotiate national-scale open-access publishing deals in broadly the same way. Global tracking and standard-setting for transformative agreements generally — including the terms and reporting practices consortia like IReL tend to follow — is coordinated by the ESAC Initiative, which maintains a public registry of transformative agreements worldwide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is IReL a publisher?
No. IReL does not publish journals itself. It is a consortium that negotiates access and open-access publishing terms with commercial and society publishers on behalf of its member institutions.
Who can use an IReL transformative agreement?
Eligibility is set per agreement, but generally a researcher needs to be affiliated with one of IReL’s member institutions and typically must be the corresponding author on the article for the agreement’s open-access terms to apply. Authors should verify current eligibility and coverage for a specific journal against IReL’s published agreement terms before submission, since coverage can be limited by article type, journal collection, or annual caps.
Does IReL cover open-access books or only journal articles?
IReL’s transformative agreements are primarily structured around journal articles, consistent with how transformative agreements work generally across national consortia. Researchers with open-access book or monograph needs should check the specific publisher agreement or their institution’s library, since terms vary and are not uniform across all of IReL’s agreements.
Is IReL the same as Research Ireland or the CoARA National Chapter Ireland?
No. IReL is a library and publishing-agreement consortium; Research Ireland (Taighde Éireann) is Ireland’s national research funding agency; and the CoARA National Chapter Ireland is a coordinating forum for research-assessment-reform commitments. See the comparison above for how the three relate.
What happens if my institution isn’t an IReL member?
Researchers at institutions outside the IReL consortium are not covered by its transformative agreements and would need to fund open-access publication through their own institutional agreements, a grant-funded APC, or another compliant open-access route.
