Springer cap agreement expected to be reached in the end of October 2023
By Beatriz Ferreira
The agreement between Dutch Universities and Springer Nature for the period 2018-2023 covers a yearly maximum of 2067 articles per year. This agreement has allowed publishing open access in 2,000 hybrid journals at no cost to the author.
However, in the coming weeks, the Springer Nature transformative agreement (TA) with UKB will reach its maximum article allowance for 2023. Once this happens, authors affiliated with Tilburg University will no longer be eligible to publish open access with fees covered by the agreement.
Researchers who want to stay informed about the status can sign in for a ‘notify-me service’. This service can also be used to receive updates on other publishers with a maximum number of open access publications.
If your article is accepted after the maximum is reached, do NOT choose "Publish open access”. If you do, you will receive a bill for the APCs. Therefore, choose 'Publish subscription' and adopt an alternative approach, such as the green route for open access. The green route is when authors deliver open access through repositories by depositing a version of their work. This is also known as “self-archiving”.
Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act is a good alternative. After a ‘reasonable period’ of 6 months, the publisher's version of your publication can be made public through the university repository. For Tilburg, this is the Tilburg University Research Portal. This alternative is also known as disclosure with a Taverne license.
Another viable option is the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS), designed to ensure Plan S compliance by cOAlition S funded authors. This strategy empowers authors to retain key rights when publishing their work, offering more control over Open Access dissemination. Through the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS), authors can keep their work in the author's version (Author Accepted Manuscript (also known as postprint), thus not the publisher's version) immediately and under a CC BY license OA, even if the publisher there imposes restrictions.
If you have any questions or need further information on publisher’s agreements and open access publishing strategies, please visit the Open Access Information Point or reach out to openaccess@tilburguniversity.edu.