Voluntary Ex Ante Transparency Notice (VEAT) for Award of Contract to Elsevier B.V. for ScienceDirect Database

Dublin City Council gives notice to invoke Article 32(2)(b) of Directive 2014/24/EU which states that the negotiated procedure without prior publication may be used where the works, supplies or services can only be supplied by a particular economic operator for (iii) the protection of exclusive rights, including intellectual property rights. Dublin City Council intends to award a contract to Elsevier B.V. for a period of three years at an estimated value of €88,967.78 ex VAT. ScienceDirect is available remotely to registered Dublin City library users from any location and at any time. ScienceDirect forms an essential part of a suite of reference and research resources provided by Dublin City Libraries to support study, research and life-long learning for the people of Dublin city. ScienceDirect is a searchable web-based multidisciplinary database specialising in scientific, medical and technical research. It is the largest scientific journal database currently available on the global market, and it is the access point to millions of academic articles published by Elsevier. It is a full-text database containing only peer-reviewed scholarly literature, featuring over 21 million articles and 375,000 topic pages, and offering access to journal articles and book chapters from more than 2,500 journals and over 11,000 books. This subscription also gives access to over 2,800 eBooks in the ScienceDirect Neuroscience & Psychology collection. ScienceDirect features an enhanced article reader which shows outlines, citations, recommendations, in-article references and author links to broaden the research experience for the user. It also features reading and search history capabilities to allow the user to keep track of their 100 most recent articles, as well as allowing the user to set up personalised alerts for related searches, journals and book series. ScienceDirect provides a research experience that is accessible to all and contains a number of features designed to enhance accessibility for people experiencing auditory, cognitive, physical, and speech and visual impairments, as follows: HTML journal articles and book chapters are compatible with screen readers such as JAWS, NVDA and Apple's VoiceOver; information is carefully structured using headings, landmarks and lists to help users of assistive technology to easily navigate pages; math content is available in MathML, which can be spoken by text-to-speech engines or converted to Braille and pasted into math equation editors or Microsoft Office documents; ARIA (Accessibility for Rich Internet Applications) is employed to enhance navigation, orientation and labelling for users of screen readers and other assistive technology; videos are played in a fully accessible media player (AblePlayer).