Value of Publishing at Springer Nature

A commitment to transparency in what we do and what it delivers

Springer Nature is committed to quality, openness and collaboration. This goes beyond just what we do, but encompasses who we are as a publisher and how we do it - Why? Because we know as a global publisher we have a duty to hold ourselves accountable and ensure that the communities we serve can transparently see how we are supporting them as the research ecosystem evolves.

Authors

Authors are at the heart of what we do, and we are committed to ensuring their work is used, reused and has the greatest reach.

  • Our content was downloaded 3.7billion times, across all platforms in 2024 - an 18% increase in downloads for research content compared to 2023. 

  • Usage of our author’s content continues to increase year on year, with journal articles being cited on average 5.2 times per article, up 4% on 2023. Average cost per download, however, has fallen c.37% since 2019 (books and journals, excluding OA content).

  • We have an 86% excellent/ good rating from authors and are ranked no.1 in terms of reputation, compared to our competitors.

  • We continue to offer the broadest selection of fully OA journals, appearing across more JCR categories than other publishers, and offer the most comprehensive OA books portfolio of any publisher. 

  • Our journals and books provide multiple comparable metrics of reach, impact and author service on their website, which for journals are also available on third-party comparison sites such as DOAJ.

  

Librarians

We work closely with the librarian community to support the research community with the tools and sustainable services it needs to access, produce and maintain the integrity of research.

  • Flexible pricing policies to ensure budget is allocated to the most relevant resources.
  • Adaptive business model to help institutions and librarians make a sustainable move to OA, meeting different regional needs.
  • Long-term journal packages and variety on books licensing options to provide best value, and ensure stable and sustainable pricing in face of policy, funding and other global changes.
  • Strict no double dipping policy - our journal subscription list prices are based only on subscription content. We do not count OA articles when assessing changes.
  • More information for librarians can be found here,  here and here

Community commitment

  • We work with a network of 174,000+ academic editors and 1.2m peer reviewers to evaluate more than 2.3 million submissions a year and publish over 482,000 articles across 3,000+ journals and 14,000+ books a year 
  • We support authors in financial need and in 2024 waived more than €34million in authors’ APCs across our fully OA journals. A number of fully-sponsored OA journals also enable authors to publish free of charge, which amounted to 10,000 OA articles in 2023. 
  • Since 2021, we’ve invested over €650 million in technology, € 177 million of that spend in 2024 alone, to improve and speed up the publishing experience, provide authors with the latest publication, language and editing tools, promote research integrity, and tackle misinformation. 
  • We continue to develop innovative book prototypes such as the first machine generated text, utilise new technologies to improve the publication cycle in a pioneering and responsible way and better support authors with the development of research.  Always keeping researchers and the quality of scientific research at the centre.  
  • We invest to accelerate solutions to world challenges - we have been carbon neutral for offices, warehouses, fleet and flights since 2020. We have set targets to reach net zero by 2040 from a 2019 baseline year. 
  • We have a role to play in supporting new ways to recognise, celebrate and communicate science within the wider community. We continue to add value through our partnerships, online portals, newsletter and award communication as well as videos and interviews with leading thinkers.  


Driving OA value across our books and journals portfolios

  • 50% of our primary research is now published OA in our hybrid and fully OA journals, up from 44% in 2023.
  • Our transformative agreements are diving OA growth and supporting researchers from over 3700+ institutions. More on TAs for our books and journals portfolios can be found here.
  • Our transformative agreements (TA) for our books and journals  portfolios, are driving OA  growth and equity, across all disciplines, supporting researchers from over 3700+ institutions.
  • Our TAs continue to have a substantial and sustained impact on increasing OA access and publication globally, delivering 7x more gold OA articles than authors choosing to publish OA in 2023 while not being part of a TA.
  • Authors publishing OA with Springer Nature see their work used more with OA articles published in our journals receiving an average citation of 6.3 times, higher than our peers, and 34% higher than our closest pure OA competitor.
  • We continue to provide one of the most comprehensive OA outlets for SDG content, which made up over 56% of our OA books published in 2024.
  • Downloads of OA book chapters and journal articles increased by over 20% between 2022-2023.

Find out more about our APC, BPC, Waiver and OA policies.

Transparent Pricing

We actively review our pricing to ensure consistency and sustainability across our books and journals portfolios. 

Our APC  and BPC pricing reflects both the value that the titles deliver as well as the costs involved in: 

  1. Managing peer review
  2. Publishing
  3. Promotion
  4. Author support
  5. Investment in improving systems to deliver a superior and sustainable service.
  6. Online indexing and hosting to ensure global discovery and access

Subscription price is based on a number of factors including:

  1. Number of subscription articles published by the journal/book

    N.b print prices for hybrid books takes into account the number of OA chapters 

  2. Article/chapter usage

  3. Value placed on the content by the wider community 

  4. Inflation and other variable costs are also taken into consideration                         

Individual customers are provided with detailed information taking into account the above factors and related to their specific accounts.