Springer Nature and University of California (UC) announce first open access agreement for Nature in North and South America
27.07.2022 13:54
Following the success of the groundbreaking transformative agreement in 2020, Springer Nature and the University of California have announced an expansion that will now allow UC authors to publish their research open access in prestigious Nature titles.
The expansion of the original agreement allows UC researchers to receive financial support for open access publications in the Nature portfolio. In 2021, under the original agreement, this model has already resulted in a tripling of UC open access articles in the Springer Nature portfolio, which includes more than 2,200 hybrid journals and over 500 open access journals. UC researchers published more than 1,300 open access articles in 2021, up from approximately 400 articles in 2020. For 2022, the UC is on track to publish an even greater number of open access articles.
The expansion comes into effect on August 1, 2022 and runs until December 31, 2024. It includes Nature, the journals of Nature Research, Nature Communications and Scientific Reports. Students, researchers and lecturers also retain reading access to their currently licensed journals in the Nature portfolio.
Carolyn J. Honor, Chief Commercial Officer of Springer Nature, commented:
“The partnership between Springer Nature and the University of California is a great success. We are therefore pleased to be able to deepen our collaboration in the form of this first publication agreement for Nature Research journals in the USA. With the number of open access articles published by the UC having already tripled since our agreement in 2020, we have decided to work together to support the transition to gold OA and open science.”
Jeff MacKie-Mason, University Librarian, Chief Digital Scholarship Officer and Professor at UC Berkeley and Co-Chair of the UC Publishers Negotiation Team, said: “UC is proud to continue to play a leading role in the open access movement for researchers and to engage people all over the world. This agreement will make important knowledge available in some of the world’s most respected scientific journals and help find solutions to some of the most pressing problems of our time.”
The agreement between Springer Nature and the UC is based on a shared funding model that allows contributions to the article processing charge (APC) costs from both library and research funds. As with the original agreement, UC Libraries will automatically pay $1,000 per APC for all articles by UC authors accepted for publication in the Nature portfolio hybrid and open access journals covered by the agreement . The difference is financed from the authors' research funds.
Springer Nature and the UC are jointly committed to supporting all authors seeking open access publishing and making it easy and affordable - regardless of discipline, location or funding.