(27 June 2019) New agreements agreed this week with the Bibsam consortium in Sweden and Norway’s Unit consortium take the number of Springer Nature’s read and publish deals to ten, putting the publisher firmly on the path to becoming a transformative publisher.
In a first for Springer Nature, Bibsam, representing the institutional libraries, and four of Sweden’s funding bodies (the Swedish Research Council, Formas, Forte and Vinnova) have agreed a deal which will see them share the costs of publishing in Springer Nature’s OA journals. This will enable Swedish researchers affiliated with participating organisations in the Bibsam consortium to publish in over 570 of Springer Nature’s OA journals, including Nature Communications, the world’s most highly cited OA journal, and Scientific Reports, one of the world’s largest OA journals, without having to directly pay APC costs.
According to the Bibsam consortium, this collaborative approach to supporting OA is, “only the beginning [and we] will continue to work with funders and publishers to find solutions for new publishing agreements”.
This landmark agreement, which also sees a renewal of Bibsam’s read and publish with Springer Nature, will cover 99% of Sweden’s publishing output.
Springer Nature has also agreed a transformative read and publish deal with Norway. This agreement, which will run from 2020 to 2022, will allow researchers in Norway to read articles in journals on SpringerLink and Norwegian authors to publish Open Access in over 2000 journals, making primary research with corresponding authors from Norway immediately and freely accessible from the point of publication, which Unit says will, “meet all our requirements for transition agreements, and will enable Norwegian researchers to read and publish in the majority of Springer journals”.
Commenting on these two agreements, Frank Vrancken Peeters, Chief Commercial Officer for Springer Nature, said: “Springer Nature is committed to speeding up the transition to Open Access as having early and rapid access to research findings is fundamental to the advancement of science and discovery.
The full press release is here.
