“The key thing here is that we’re integrating those into a single contract. “In the US, there already were multiple funding sources-libraries paid for subscriptions, and when authors wanted to publish open access, they paid a surcharge on top of that out of their funds,” says MacKie-Mason. In cases where researchers don’t have funding for publishing, UC plans to cover the cost. To pay for this transition, UC and Springer Nature have implemented what they call a multi-payer model, in which UC pays $1,000 of the APC, and the authors of a paper cover the rest from their research grants. He adds that there are also “guardrails” for payments-a minimum and maximum number of articles UC will pay APCs for in order to ensure UC’s expenditures are limited and that Springer Nature’s revenues are protected. “As the journals shift from being primarily subscription articles to primarily open-access articles, the need for and justification for a reading fee will start to go away,” MacKie-Mason says. That reading fee is subject to change, depending on the number of publications that are published as open access. UC will also pay a separate reading fee of $750,000 per year for access to the paywalled articles in Springer Nature’s portfolio. “If Springer comes back with something unreasonable after that, we’ve already shown that we’re willing to cancel agreements if we need to.” “This is only an agreement through 2023,” says Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, university librarian and economics professor at UC Berkeley, and co-chair of UC’s publisher negotiation team. What the increases to APCs will look like after 2023 is unclear. APCs for the fully open-access journals will increase by no more than 3.5 percent each year after 2021, and APCs for hybrids will remain frozen until 2023, when it will increase by 2 percent. The article processing charges (APCs) that Springer Nature will bill for titles under the new contract vary: for hybrid journals, the fee will be set to the prices paid by UC in 2019 (which, according to Webster, was an average of $3,200 per article), while the pricetag for fully open-access journals will be set to 15 percent less than prices paid in 2020 (the price in 2019 was approximately $2,000 per article on average).
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This deal is a so-called transformative open-access agreement-a designation given to contracts designed to shift the business model of scholarly publishing from one that’s primarily subscription-based (where people pay to access paywalled content) to one that’s primarily open access, where fees are paid to publish articles that are free for all to read. This includes approximately 2,000 hybrid journals, which contain both paywalled and open-access articles, and 500 fully open-access journals (all Nature-branded titles are initially excluded). The Springer Nature contract covers a period of four years (2020 to 2023), and it will enable academics in the UC system to publish their papers as open access in more than 2,700 of Springer Nature’s journals. (Elsevier, too, has successfully made several open-access deals over the last year.) See “ Elsevier Progresses in Open-Access Deal Making” “ our first agreement in North America, which is a big deal for us,” says Carrie Webster, the vice president of open access at Springer Nature. UC plans to publish the details of the agreement on its website on Wednesday. The deal with Springer Nature is the largest to date. Since then, UC has signed open-access agreements with four other publishers, including Cambridge University Press and PLOS. Open access was also a sticking point in UC’s negotiations with Elsevier, which resulted in the university ending its subscription with the publisher last spring. Some of those negotiations have gotten heated: Just last week, MIT announced that it had canceled ongoing discussions with the academic publisher Elsevier due to an inability to come to terms on an open-access deal. Over the last few years, universities and research institutions around the world have been pushing publishers for agreements that advance open access to journals.
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