We’re delighted to announce that on January 4, 2021, UC authors will be able to begin making research they publish in Springer journals freely available for anyone to read by taking advantage of the university’s new transformative open access agreement with Springer Nature.
The first phase of the agreement will support UC authors whose articles are accepted by journals in the Springer portion of the Springer Nature portfolio, including Springer, BioMed Central, Adis, and Palgrave Macmillan titles, as well as academic journals on nature.com.
After January 4, upon acceptance of an article, UC-affiliated corresponding authors will, by default, have their article designated for open access publishing, with funding support from the UC libraries. The support will work in this way:
- For authors whose articles are accepted in journals from the Springer portion of the Springer Nature portfolio and who choose open access publishing, the UC libraries will automatically pay the first $1,000 toward the open access fee (called an Article Processing Charge or APC).
- Authors who do not have research funds available can request that the UC libraries pay the entire open access fee, ensuring that lack of research funds does not present a barrier for UC authors who wish to publish open access in these journals.
As with other similar publishing agreements, authors may opt out of open access publishing if they prefer to publish their article on a subscription (pay-to-read) basis.
The integration of Nature-branded journals into the agreement is expected in 2022.
More detail about the agreement is available in the overview of the open access agreement.
If you have questions, please contact Scholarly Communication at the Library.