Our current Springer Read & Publish agreement, covering subscription (read) access and open access publishing at no cost to our corresponding authors, expires on 31st December 2022.
The Read & Publish national negotiations for 2023 include both Springer and Nature branded journals. This is a change to our current agreement which includes publishing access only to Springer journals. Reaching an agreement is important to make it easier for our authors to publish their work open access, as well as continuing to read all of Springer Nature’s content. The deal needs to be affordable for our sector, which is already under financial strain. Affordability is critical, given the hyper-inflated open access publishing costs charged by Springer Nature (9500 Euro per APC in some Nature journals).
The negotiations are led by a Jisc taskforce, in collaboration with UK universities. The negotiations are complex as they include Nature branded titles, and we are hopeful that an affordable, fair agreement will be reached. However, we cannot guarantee that a deal can be reached and this scenario would affect our read access and open access publishing within all Springer Nature journals.
Jisc have issued a consultation, and we will liaise with Faculty on our institutional response to Jisc. The negotiations will continue throughout January-February 2023, and if an agreement is reached it will be backdated to 1st January 2023.
Springer Nature are currently suggesting that read access would be maintained during January-February 2023, whilst negotiations continue. Our current agreement with Springer Nature includes (post-cancellation) perpetual access to some key journal titles. We would retain access to much of the historical content we currently subscribe to, even if we do not sign a new agreement for 2023. The LibKey Nomad browser plug-in makes accessing both subscription and legal open access content easy.
Post-cancellation access would not include new publications, but our staff and students will be able to quickly obtain articles using the University Library Document Delivery service if they are not available via a legal open access route.
You will fulfil the University of Southampton Open Access Policy by uploading the Author Accepted Manuscripts of all peer-reviewed journal articles and peer-reviewed conference articles to Pure at the point of acceptance for publication.
If you are funded by UKRI, Wellcome Trust and CRUK: the Library holds funds from these funders to pay reasonable Article Processing Charges, APCs (up to £4000) in fully open access journals; please apply before submission http://go.soton.ac.uk/asc
If you do not have a UKRI, Wellcome Trust or CRUK grant: we do not have a central University fund for open access, but you may be able to pay APCs from your own funds
Hybrid journals contain a mix of open access and subscription content
If we do not have an open access publishing agreement with Springer Nature for 2023, please publish under the traditional subscription model and self-archive the Accepted Manuscript version of your article in Pure. This will not incur an open access publishing fee.
Your funder (including UKRI and Wellcome Trust) may require you to include a rights retention statement in the acknowledgements section on submission: “For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission”. This prior assignment of rights allows the Author Accepted Manuscript to be made openly available from an institutional repository with no publisher-mandated embargo. We recommend all authors, regardless of funder, include this statement, which is supported by many publishers. However, please be aware that Springer Nature are putting up barriers to prevent authors asserting their choice by refusing to accept the rights retention statement, which may mean your article will not meet your funder open access requirements.
You will fulfil the University of Southampton Open Access Policy by uploading the Author Accepted Manuscripts of all peer-reviewed journal articles and peer-reviewed conference articles to Pure at the point of acceptance.
We will keep our Springer Nature page updated with any developments, and email Associate Deans Research and Deputy Heads of School Research when we have new information. Please contact eprints@soton.ac.uk with any questions.
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