Wed, January 20, 2021 9:35 AM
Dear UC Merced Academic Community:
Happy New Year!
We are excited to announce that the University of California has entered into a transformative open access agreement with Springer Nature. This agreement will allow UC authors to make their research published in Springer Nature journals freely available for anyone to read.
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, Adis, and Palgrave Macmillan titles, as well as academic journals on nature.com.
Here's how the new process will work:
After January 4, upon acceptance of an article, UC-affiliated corresponding authors (faculty, lecturers, staff, and graduate students) 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:
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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).
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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 on these pages:
If you have any questions about any part of this process, please contact Jerrold Shiroma at the UC Merced Library at jshiroma@ucmerced.edu.
- Haipeng Li, University Librarian
