BUVAL

On 27 November, the General Assembly of the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE) approved the renewal of the transformative agreement with the publisher IEEE for the open access publication of the scientific output of Spanish universities.

This agreement, with a three-year term (2026–2028), includes the participation of the public universities of the Valencian Community and will be managed by the five university libraries that make up the BUVAL Consortium. Thanks to this agreement, research staff will have access to IEEE Xplore, the academic database that provides full-text content in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Electronics. In addition, up to 180 articles may be published in open access in more than 170 hybrid journals, with APC costs fully covered.

The agreement also includes a 20% discount on article publication fees in Gold journals. To benefit from this discount, it is essential that the corresponding author meets the criteria established by each university. During the 2023–2025 period, when the first agreement with IEEE was in force, Valencian researchers published 111 articles in hybrid journals with APC costs covered.

In addition, the agreement with the publisher RSC has also been renewed, with the participation of UA, UJI, UPV and UV. This agreement will cover the open access publication costs of 138 articles in hybrid and Gold journals published by the same publisher.