Springer Nature Proposes, Seeks Feedback on “A Faster Path to an Open Future”

From a Springer Nature Announcement:

Springer Nature sets out a new approach to research publishing with the goal of increasing the demand from authors to immediately publish their research open access (OA) and growing the supply of journals able to publish OA, potentially enabling even highly selective journals such as Nature to transition to OA.

The new approach would see publishers move from generally being passive enablers of open access to being active drivers of the transition to OA, with this demonstration of commitment increasing institutions and funding bodies’ confidence and support. Views are being sought on the proposed new publishing standard – Transformative Publishing – which encompasses two main elements:

1. ‘Transformative’ read and publish deals:  These deals are already proven to accelerate the transition to OA by significantly increasing OA take up. Transformative Publishers would commit to offer them where institutions, consortia or research funding bodies wish to use them and to scale them when in place.
2. Transformative journals:  Publishers would commit to adapt the hybrid and subscription journals that they own so that, by complying with the required standard and set of requirements, these journals would be 100% OA for primary research articles at the end of the transition.  These requirements include:

• Promoting the benefits of OA to authors prior to submission, at submission and during the peer-review process to allow for comparisons to be made
• Operating a more transparent APC pricing policy that explains the value and cost rationale of each APC pricing band to our customers
• Reporting on the OA and subscription content volumes and usage of its transformative journals portfolio so that institutional librarians can evaluate the cost per article cost and the article cost per download of their subscription content

Learn More, Direct to Complete Blog Post by Steven Inchcoombe, Chief Publishing Officer at Springer Nature

Direct to Complete Proposal Document (1 page; PDF via LinkedIn)

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Funding, News, Open Access, Publishing, Springer Nature