The University of California (UC) system today announced it has signed the biggest open-access (OA) deal in North America with one of the largest commercial scientific publishers. The agreement with Springer Nature includes a commitment by the publisher to explore making all articles that UC corresponding authors publish in the Nature family of journals immediately free to read on publication starting in 2022.
The new deal is notable, in part, because it includes Nature, one of the world’s most prominent journals, as well as highly selective sister titles in the Nature Research group, which total 148 journals. “These flagship journals are the hardest nut to crack [for OA], and this is the first big step forward, we think worldwide, in doing so,” says Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, university librarian at UC Berkeley and co-chair of UC’s publisher negotiation team.
UC says the deal, covering 2020 to 2023, represents a milestone in its campaign to push all scientific journals toward OA. It ratcheted up that effort in 2019 by ending subscriptions with another publishing giant, Elsevier.
The new deal gives UC access to read 1000 more journals than its current contract with Springer Nature allows, while lowering net payments in 2021 by at least 5% from this year’s level. It also calls for all articles that UC authors publish in the 2700 other journals run by Springer Nature to be immediately OA unless the authors opt out.
Publishers have expressed strong reservations about moving toward OA deals for highly selective journals because they predict the cost to authors would be prohibitive. In the immediate OA model, journals derive some or all of their revenue by charging authors to publish papers—an alternative to the existing, predominant business model in which institutions pay subscriptions for their readers. But because exclusive titles such as Nature reject the large majority of manuscripts submitted, publishers contend they would have to set author fees high to cover the expense of that work.
The average author fee for “hybrid” journals, which charge author fees and subscriptions, was $2900 per paper, according to a 2018 report by the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers. By contrast, Nature Communications, an OA journal operated by Springer Nature, charges $5380.
Springer Nature and UC will conduct an OA pilot for Nature journals in 2021 and negotiate fees for UC authors to publish OA in them. The publisher committed in April to transition most of its subscription journals, including those in the Nature Research group, to immediate OA for all authors globally. So far, however, it hasn’t set a timetable for that change or released other details.
Still, MacKie-Mason says just having Springer Nature’s commitment in the UC deal to explore that change, with an explicit implementation date, is promising. “It’s a bigger step than Springer Nature has agreed with anyone else in the world,” he adds. There was no such provision in Springer Nature’s agreement in August 2019 with Project DEAL, a consortium of institutions in Germany that is the world’s largest OA deal. And if UC and the publisher cannot reach terms over the Nature titles, UC retains the right to stop subscribing to them starting in 2022….
