The University of California, which has struggled for years against the business model of profit-seeking scientific publishers, has just won a big win: a four-year deal that will make the content of more than 2,700 journals published by Springer Nature available to UC without subscription fees.
In exchange, UC writers will pay fees for Springer Nature after their articles are accepted for publication in these journals. The fee will allow anyone to read and use published papers for free. The contract runs until 2023.
The agreement announced this week unites system of the leading research universities in the country and the second largest scientific and technical publisher in the world. This is a big step forward in the campaign by UC – as well as academic institutions throughout the US and the world – to cancel the business model of existing nonprofit academic publishers.
This is a big agreement. This shows the world that the open access publishing model that we have promoted is appropriate for all sizes of publishers, including large non-profit commercial publishers.
Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, UC university librarian
In this campaign UC uses heavy weaponry, as its source it is estimated that 10% of all studies produced in the U.S. The University accounts for about 2% of all content published by the journal Springer Nature.
But universities have struggled to manage a subscription budget of around $ 50 million per year, according to Ivy Anderson, executive director of the UC California Digital Library.
As subscription fees continue to increase inevitably, squeezing resources for other services, UC, like other institutions, starts looking for ways to get more value from its expenses while expanding the spread of its research.
Prior to this, UC reached open access agreements with a number of smaller publishers, but none were on the Springer Nature scale.
“This is a big deal,” said University Librarian Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, who is also a Berkeley economics professor. “This shows the world that the open access publishing model that we have promoted is appropriate for all sizes of publishers, including large nonprofit commercial publishers.”
Traditionally, publishers accept papers for publication for free but charge steep subscription fees. The model means, in practice, that academic users incur costs for conducting their research and once again reading their own papers in print or online. This model also builds a financial wall between writers and fellow scientists, who also have to pay to read published papers.
The Springer Nature deal effectively puts the world’s largest scientific and technical publisher, Elsevier, on the sidewalk. UC has struggled since 2018 to change an 11 million dollar subscription contract with Elsevier to an open access model.
Both parties were unable to reach an agreement despite the extended game of brinkmanship. In March 2019, after failing to reach an agreement on open access, UC ended its subscription to 2,500 Elsevier academic journals, including some of the most important publications in the world such as Lancet and Cell.
Elsevier allowed the faculty, students, and UC staff to continue to access the journal until mid-July, when it finally cut off their access to most new material. (Content from 2018 and earlier remains available.)
The conflict reflects Elsevier’s generally harsh approach to the demand for open access, which has spread throughout the world; users in Germany have been disconnected the publisher has reached an agreement with users in the Netherlands, Sweden and several research universities restoring access that was terminated while allowing several open access rights.
An Elsevier spokesman called the Springer Nature agreement “good news for researchers and the shared goals of open access are progressing.”
He said the agreement “shows what is possible with the UC system as we continue our dialogue … towards a sustainable solution.” UC said it was not currently negotiating a new contract with Elsevier, even though the two sides had continued “the conversation.”
“We have been looking for some common ground so we can negotiate,” MacKie-Mason said.
Unlike Elsevier, Springer Nature proactively adheres to the open access model. It largely recognizes the model as the future of academic publishing in a world where financial constraints increasingly afflict academic institutions of all sizes.
“Open access is at the core of our strategy,” Carrie Webster, vice president of open access at the publisher, told me. “We have long believed that it is in the best interest of research. The open access business model is an important step towards achieving the future of open science.”
UC, for its part, is committed to opening access in 2013, in recognition that it is the best way to “disseminate research and scholarships as widely as possible.”
According to Memorandum of Understanding released this week, UC authors will be able to publish their articles open-access in most Springer Nature journals.
This arrangement does not include the journals Nature and Nature-branded, which was obtained by Springer in Berlin in 2015 and which is ranked among the most prestigious scientific journals in the world. But the contract anticipates that the journals will be included in the regulation in 2022.
Meanwhile, UC will have permanent access to more than 2,200 journals published under the print of Springer, Palgrave, Adis and Macmillan.
According to the arrangement, UC is expected to cover the first $ 1,000 of the cost of publishing Springer articles per paper, with researchers contributing the excess from foundation grants or other sources. The university will bear the excess for researchers without adequate facilities.
Researchers who prefer to publish under the traditional subscription model will be able to opt out of the open access arrangement if they publish in the journal Springer Nature which is “hybrid” – that is, accept papers on both models.
Overall, UC is expected to pay at least 5% less for Springer Nature than under the previous contract. Anderson and MacKie-Mason refused to say how much the university had paid before, but said that it was less than the $ 11 million spent on subscription and Elsevier’s fees.
