Springer Nature Open Access Agreement
In the midst of what have been difficult times, I am pleased to share some very good news. The University of California has reached a transformative open access agreement with Springer Nature, the world’s second-largest academic publisher.
Under the agreement, all articles with a UC corresponding author published in more than 2,700 of Springer Nature’s journals will be open access by default, with the UC libraries paying a portion of the open access fee on behalf of all authors. Authors without available research funds for the remainder of the publishing fee can request that the library cover the entire amount. Authors may also choose to opt out of open access publishing if they wish.
While broad-based open access publishing in the most well-known Nature journals is not initially included, the deal commits Springer Nature and UC to collaborating on an open science pilot in 2021 and developing plans for a transformative agreement for all of the Nature journals to be implemented in the third year of the agreement.
The deal also includes reading access and perpetual rights to more than 1,000 journals in Springer Nature’s portfolio to which UC did not previously subscribe.
The open access publishing provisions will go into effect once the formal agreement has been signed and will run through 2023. More details are available on the UC’s Office of Scholarly Communication website.
The new Springer Nature agreement — the largest open access agreement in North America to date — is an exciting note on which to end the year. Over the course of the year, UC has also implemented four other transformative open access agreements, with a diverse range of publishers — Cambridge University Press, society publisher ACM, and native open access publishers JMIR and PLoS) — and conversations with other publishers are still underway.
Together, these deals demonstrate the broad potential of UC’s approach to transform scholarly publishing in the United States to a sustainable, open access model, and to provide broad public access to the fruits of UC’s research.
We will continue to keep you apprised of any new agreements or other notable developments. If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Jerrold Shiroma, Digital Scholarship Librarian at jshiroma@ucmerced.edu at any time.
Based on campus email from Haipeng Li (University Librarian) Maria DePrano (Library and Scholarly Communications Chair), Tom Handford (Academic Senate Chair), and Teenie Matlock (Vice Provost for the Faculty)
