Starting January 4, 2021, UC authors can make their research published in Springer journals freely available to anyone through a new agreement between Springer Nature and the University of California.

The first phase of the transformative open access agreement will support UC authors whose articles are accepted by journals in the Springer portion of the Springer Nature portfolio, including Springer, Adis, and Palgrave Macmillan titles, as well as academic journals on nature.com.

The automated workflow integrated into the Springer submission/acceptance web-services began Jan. 4, 2021; however, if you had an article accepted in Dec. 2020, please reach out to Tiffany Moxham, Associate University Library for Content and Discovery so that the library can help to ensure you receive all available negotiated APC waiver levels.

Upon acceptance of an article, by default UC-affiliated corresponding authors will have their article designated for open access publishing, with funding support from the UC libraries. The support will work in this way:

• For authors whose articles are accepted in journals from the Springer portion of the Springer Nature portfolio and who choose open access publishing, the UC libraries will automatically pay the first $1,000 toward the open access fee (called an Article Processing Charge or APC).
• Authors who do not have research funds available can request that the UC libraries pay the entire open access fee, ensuring that lack of research funds does not present a barrier for UC authors who wish to publish open access in these journals.

As with other similar publishing agreements, authors may opt out of open access publishing if they prefer to publish their article on a subscription (pay-to-read) basis.

Integration of the Nature-branded journals into the agreement is expected in 2022.

More detail about the agreement is available at:

• Overview of the open access agreement