Open access books & chapters

Springer Nature publishes open access (OA) books and chapters under its Springer, Palgrave Macmillan and Apress imprints. We helped to pioneer open access book publishing, first piloting open access publication for books in 2011. We publish open access books across a wide range of areas in science, technology, medicine (STM), and humanities and social sciences (HSS).

Open access books advantage

Open access book highlights

Springer's notable open access books list includes author Gerard t'Hooft, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics and co-author Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and winner of the 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award, as well as the IMISCOE Research Series book Contested Childhoods which was selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2017.

Palgrave Macmillan was one of the first publishers to offer an open access option for HSS and the first major publisher to offer CC BY for OA books. Palgrave Macmillan’s notable OA titles include the first Wellcome Trust-funded OA monograph Fungal Disease in Britain and the United States 1850-2000 as well as other titles: The Academic Book of the Future, Digital Kenya and European Citizenship After Brexit. 

Our open access books portfolio has published over 2000 books since launch, and achieved over 200 million chapter downloads since 2013. Check out our usage statistics and our portfolio pages to find out more.

Watch our open access book videos

Why publish an open access book?

How does it work? OA books in 6 steps

 

Community involvement

We work with external partners and the scholarly community to lead the way for open access books:

  • Springer Nature is a member of OAPEN, a dedicated platform for hosting, dissemination, discovery and preservation of open access books
  • We are sponsors of the Directory of Open Access Books, for increased discoverability of open access books
  • We participated in the Developing a Pilot Data Trust for Open Access Ebook Usage project
  • We are co-founders and members of the Editorial Advisory Board for the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit
  • We participate in various conferences such as Academic Publishing in Europe (APE), Charleston,  FORCE, OASPA, OpenCon, Researcher to Reader and Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP).
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