The University of St Andrews and Springer Nature

Following a year of negotiations, the HE Library sector supported by Jisc has now reached a three-year agreement with Springer Nature (with a review after year two). The agreement meets the key requirements which were set out at national level on behalf of our researchers and students. Libraries and Museums teams were instrumental in helping the sector achieve this deal by carefully evaluating the five proposals received from SN over the course of the negotiations, engaging with our researchers to keep them informed, modelling content scenarios and exploring options for maintaining access to content in the event that a deal could not be reached.

For St Andrews, the 'Read and Publish' agreement for hybrid journals achieves a modest reduction on our publishing and subscription costs and provides full and immediate open access for corresponding authors across Springer Nature's hybrid titles, including the Nature and Palgrave portfolio, which will help our researchers to meet funder open access requirements. The deal is the first open access (OA) agreement globally to acknowledge the the retention of intellectual property rights by providing a bespoke licence to publish. Crucially this means that authors can choose to follow the 'green' route as set out in our new institutional OA Policy, in addition to the 'gold' route provided by the publisher.

A separate agreement is also in place to cover Fully OA titles, providing a 15% discount on Article Processing Charges (APCs). Individual APCs are paid from appropriate sources of funds.

Although we have accepted the deal, St Andrews, in line with the rest of the sector, has expressed serious reservations about the offer, whether it is truly 'transitional', and the longer term implications of article-based charging models with commercial publishers. Jisc will carry out a critical review by engaging with publishers, funders, UK institutions, and other consortia around the world. The outcome will be a narrative report by the end of 2023, which will provide a clear vision of an open, sustainable, and equitable scholarly publishing environment.

Key Questions

Many publishers impose Article Processing Charges (APCs) to make a publication open access in one of their journals. This is one model which seeks to replace the income usually received through subscription charges when articles are behind a paywall. Many journals are 'hybrid' which means some of their content is still covered by subscription, and some is made OA on payment of APCs. The University will only cover these 'hybrid' APCs if they are part of a transformative agreement with sustainable costs.

An individual article can incur £9,948 in Article Processing Charges when an author publishes in a Nature Research journal. The University does not support these individual APCs in hybrid journals, so any proposal from Springer Nature must show that publishing costs are fair and reasonable.

Major funders have requirements for immediate open access to the publications they fund, and St Andrews is strongly committed to the benefits of making our research widely available. It is important to note that OA can also be achieved in hybrid/ subscription journals through the green route (deposit of accepted manuscripts in Pure) and we recommend authors follow our OA Policy.
Publishers and research institutions are developing a range of new business models to find more sustainable approaches to open access publishing.

The University of St Andrews has entered into 'transitional' open access agreements with many major publishers and Learned Societies on a read and publish model. Under these agreements, the publisher receives payment for providing access to their journal portfolio and payment for publishing, bundled into a single contract.

In this way, the University supports the wide dissemination of its research and scholarship at a sustainable cost.

Transitional agreements are supported by cOAlition S funders as they help to transform scholarly publishing towards the Plan S goal of achieving full and immediate open access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications from research funded by public and private grants.

An alternative is the green approach which provides most of the benefits in a cost-effective way while being globally sustainable and equitable. This method based on rights retention is set out on our new Open Access policy.
Some journals run on a business model that means all their content is open access, so there are no subscription fees to transition. Springer Nature, like many commercial publishers, has chosen to retain a model based on publication fees per article (rather than collective action or partnership models being developed by some publishers and societies).

Article Processing Charges will be discounted under the UK agreement where the corresponding author is identified to be from St Andrews. The APC may be covered either by central funds (for example our UKRI Block Grant), or an alternative source depending on underlying funding. See instructions for publishing in Springer Nature fully OA journals on our OA agreements web page.

For further information, please contact our Head of Open Research, Jackie Proven open-research@st-andrews.ac.uk.

The University of St Andrews and Springer Nature

Key Questions

Why do we incur costs for publishing in journals?

Is there an alternative?

Why do we still pay APCs for fully OA journals?