Springer Nature has signed its first transformative agreement (TA) with CRUI-CARE (Conferenza dei Rettori delle Universita Italiane), the association of Italian state and non-state universities which acts on behalf of over 90 Italian academic and research institutions. This agreement is the first TA for Springer Nature in Southern Europe, and adds to its already 11 national agreements,supporting an ever growing number of European countries on their path to a fully OA environment.
TA’s enable participating institutions to combine journal subscription (read) access along with open access (OA) publication costs (APCs). In addition to managing the cost and administration of OA, TA’s offer authors an easy way to comply with funders’ OA requirements. For Italy, this means that all researchers belonging to participating institutions can publish OA in Springer Nature’s portfolio of over 2,200 hybrid journals, including Palgrave and Adis journals. The agreement is expected to see over 3500 articles a year from Italian researchers published OA, meaning they will be freely and universally available for the world’s students, scholars and scientists to read, share, use and reuse from the point of publication. Eligible researchers will also have full access to all Springer, Palgrave and Adis subscription journal content. This agreement will run for four years up to 31 December 2024.
Speaking of the agreement Dagmar Laging, Vice President, Institutional Sales Europe, Springer Nature said:
“Transformative agreements such as this one have an incredibly important role in driving the transition to open access, having been proven to enable country level ‘flips’ to OA. We are therefore incredibly proud to partner with such a prestigious organisation such as CRUI-CARE on our first deal in Southern Europe . Together we can make research by Italian academics instantly available around the world, advancing OA publishing and through this, enable real progress in advancing open science.”
As the largest OA publisher of primary research, Springer Nature continues to drive forward the sustainable transition to OA for all authors regardless of discipline. Springer Nature has in place more national TA’s than any other publisher, including the world’s largest by volume of articles with Projekt DEAL in Germany and the largest in North America, to date, with the University of California. Springer Nature publishes the world’s most comprehensive OA portfolio with over 600 fully OA journals and published over 100,000 articles via gold OA in 2019. The publisher continues to drive forward routes to OA through new books and journals, including the launch and introduction of transformative journals. Driving the opening up of research and the development of open science remains Springer Nature’s primary focus in serving the research community. More information on the publisher’s approach can be found here.
