Tulane University Libraries has entered into a transformative open-access agreement with another major journal publisher, this time Springer Nature. The agreement effectively waives the article publication charges for Tulane primary authors who want their articles to be published as open access or publicly available in more than 2,040 Springer and Palgrave McMillan journals. The Libraries negotiated similar agreements independently with other major publishers, including Elsevier, Wiley, Cambridge University Press, and the American Chemical Society.
The arrangement with Springer Nature is a group agreement, with 120 other institutions participating, and brokered through the library consortium Lyrasis. The article publication changes incurred by authors affiliated with these institutions will effectively be built into their libraries’ subscription charges during the agreement’s three-year term. There is a limit to the number of articles covered, but it is an aggregate annual limit that would be addressed by the partner libraries and the publishers if it is exceeded.
Authors eligible to have article publication changes covered under this and the library’s other transformative agreements must be a corresponding author, which is defined as the person who handles the manuscript and correspondence during the publication process – from manuscript correction and proofreading to handling the revisions and re-submission of revised manuscripts up to the acceptance of the manuscripts. The waiver of these charges occurs during the article submission process and, at the journal end, within the publisher's author dashboard.
Nature journals are not covered under the agreement, but all of the publisher’s other journals are. See this full list at https://resource-cms.springernature.com/springer-cms/rest/v1/content/26326572/data/v7
Springer Nature has created an information page for prospective authors about the Lyrasis brokered arrangement. See https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/oa-agreements/lyrasis
Springer Nature is a global publisher that serves and supports the research community internationally. It is one of the world’s leading publishers of research and includes publications branded under the publisher names Springer, Nature Research, BMC, and Palgrave Macmillan.
Publishing open access in traditional subscription based journals such as those covered by this and our other transformative agreements allows Tulane authors to continue to publish in high-impact, highly respected titles but in a more widely accessible way that also meets funding requirements. It has added importance because guidelines from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy now call for the results of all federally funded research to be freely available without paywalls.
