According to a press release by Springer Nature there is a new contract of the group with Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
The deal is based on the principle of “read and publish” and shall fulfill the requirements of Plan S. As noted by Springer Nature the “agreement limits the costs of publishing all UK articles open access (OA) while maintaining access to all of Springer’s subscription articles. The deal converts the previous subscription agreement to one based on OA.” One could also phrase it more critically: The agreement allows Open Access only against continued subscription.
Steven Inchcoombe, chief publishing officer at Springer Nature, emphases in the press release: “By making it easy for researchers, 77% of our UK corresponding authors’ work is now available for free immediately at the point of publication (Gold OA) showing that real progress in advancing open research can be achieved.”
Since in my opinion only articles by corresponding authors from the UK are published Open Access and the rest of the publications are not, I would rather speak of Hybrid Open Access.
According to the press release the new agreement makes it possible that 99.8% of all articles covered by the deal will be published under a Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ licence (CC BY).
As the Times Higher Education states the “three-year agreement, valued at £9.6 million, excludes Springer Nature’s prestigious Nature-branded titles”.
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Graduate sociologist, information scientist (PhD degree), associate of scidecode science consulting – De Castro, Herb, Rothfritz GbR, working for the Saarland University and State Library (Germany)