Open Research

Information for the Librarian community


Sign up for The Link Alerts

What do we mean when we talk about Open Research at Springer Nature? 

Open Research takes many forms at Springer Nature and as a leading publisher we are committed to transitioning to open access and supporting our communities in doing so too. Librarians are increasingly involved in the transition and implementation of this. Here we provide information and insights in to our Transformative Agreements, Open Access products and options, Open Research services, and the funding and policies that underpin them all.

Routes to Open Access

To accelerate the transition to Open Access, we proactively promote the benefits of OA to increase uptake, and offer innovative agreement solutions to support any author who wishes to publish in our journals, regardless of their funding situation. We also want to ensure that all authors wishing to publish with us are able to comply where funding regulations require research be made immediately open access upon publication, as is the case with a Plan S funder's grant. Springer Nature offers the following routes to compliant open access:

  • Transformative Journals: enabling immediate OA options for primary research, including for Nature and the Nature research journals.
  • Fully OA Journals: over 600 titles across Springer Nature imprints  
  • Transformative Agreements: collaborating with funders/institutions to enable centralised funding for OA payments for authors in participating/eligible institutions

In some cases your author may need to consult with the funder regarding additional actions they need to make to ensure they meet requirements.

Find out more through our support pages and to download our full list of compliant journals.

Our commitment to consistent and sustainable pricing for hybrid/Transformative Journals

We annually review our journal price lists to ensure our pricing remains consistent and sustainable across our whole journal portfolio. The subscription price of a journal is calculated based on only its subscription articles and includes a number of factors such as the number of subscription articles the journal publishes; how much the articles are used; and the value placed on the research by the wider community. Inflation and other variable costs are also taken into consideration.

When authors choose to publish via the immediate gold open access (OA) route in our hybrid and TJs, these OA articles are assessed separately from subscription articles. We do not count OA articles when assessing changes in article publication rates or usage, in line with our longstanding “no double dipping” commitment for hybrid/transformative journals.

Open Research products and services