Thursday, December 17, 2020

Springer Nature Transformative Open Access Agreement - Dec. 17, 2020

 In June 2020, the University of California (UC) and Springer Nature announced that they have entered into a groundbreaking transformative open access agreement, the first such agreement Springer Nature has established in the United States, and the largest transformative open access agreement in North America to date.  The agreement will enable UC authors who publish with Springer Nature to make their research freely available to the world to read, and will also expand UC’s access to Springer Nature’s subscription journals. Through the agreement, the UC libraries are providing funding to support open access publishing fees for UC authors who publish with Springer Nature journals (including fully covering those fees for authors who do not have research funds available for this purpose) by redirecting funds previously devoted to subscription fees. In addition, the agreement adds reading access to more than 1,000 journals in Springer Nature’s portfolio, along with perpetual access rights to all journals for which there is read access. 

Agreement Basics

This four-year agreement runs from 2020 through 2023, and incorporates open access publishing in support of UC’s mission. In addition, it expands UC’s reading access to 1,000 more Springer titles, and upholds the university’s goal to manage its costs for academic journal subscriptions responsibly.  

I have a paper that was published with Springer in 2020.  Will that be covered by the agreement?

Unfortunately, we are unable to apply this agreement retroactively to papers accepted for publication in 2020. Before articles could be included under the agreement, we needed to formalize the workflow and contract details. 

The publishing aspects of the agreement will be implemented in two phases. 

Phase I: to begin in January 2021 —  Open access with UC libraries contribution to open access publishing fees 

Phase II starts in 2022 and involves the integration of Nature branded journals into the open access publishing part of the agreement

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