Open access for all: Empowering researchers and communities worldwide

Author: Jovial Toh

Opening up your work can accelerate research and help advance discovery, innovation, and global solutions to real-world challenges. For Open Access (OA) Week 2024, we wanted to share how we’re supporting you as a researcher to embrace open science practices through OA.

The role of open science and open access 

Sharing your research outputs – whether publications, preprints, data, code, protocols, methods, or peer review – has multiple benefits to you and others, both within and beyond the research community. Open science practices ensure that your work can be found, used, and re-used by others. As well as creating efficiencies, being open also makes it more likely that your work can produce interdisciplinary collaboration. This drives forwards economic or social impact, including progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Crucially, open science goes hand in hand with responsible research practices, and therefore is also helping to enhance public trust in science.

OA publishing is the foundation of our approach to open science. We have advocated for OA for over 20 years, supporting authors in all disciplines with trusted routes to publish their work openly. We have published more than 1.4 million primary research and review articles OA, including 183,000 OA articles in 2023.

We are committed to transitioning all the primary research we publish to Gold OA, which ensures that the authoritative version of your work (linked to data, code, and academic record) is immediately available to everyone.

Why open access benefits you as an author 

Publishing OA ensures that the widest possible audience can access and use your research, leading to increased engagement and impact. Springer Nature’s OA articles achieve 6x higher usage on average than similar subscription articles. We also see OA articles attracting greater attention and engagement. OA articles achieve, on average 4.9x more Altmetric attention compared with subscription articles, and 1.6x more citations. In 2022, our articles were the most cited OA articles among the top 10 largest publishers (5.85 citations on average).

Equitable open access and transformative agreements

Transformative agreements (TAs) are playing a critical role in transitioning to OA at scale and are a key part of our efforts to ensure everyone can benefit from OA. As an author, TAs make it easy for you to choose OA without the need to source or manage the payment of an article processing charge (APC). It also ensures that you benefit from the increased visibility, usage, and impact that OA consistently delivers.

TAs are helping many more authors choose OA: "Our TAs now support researchers at more than 3,700 institutions globally", driving 3x as many gold OA articles in Springer hybrid titles than via authors choosing OA outside of a TA. We are seeing a 46% year on year increase in OA articles, showing the demand and increase for OA from researchers worldwide.

The impact of agreements on the proportion of OA publications at a country level is demonstrated in Germany. 2020 was the year Projekt DEAL’s agreement with Springer Nature went live, with a rapid rise in the proportion of OA articles immediately in the first year of the agreement.

TAs also increase equity for many authors by supporting the full academic community at participating institutions. By pooling funding, it becomes easier for researchers in less well-funded disciplines – particularly the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) – to publish OA. Our OA uptake continues to see the highest increase from HSS researchers, with a 36% uptake in 2023.

For Germany’s Projekt DEAL, it is clear how the agreement has boosted OA uptake in research fields with less OA funding. The proportion of papers in hybrid journals that were published OA leapt from 8% to 76% in the Humanities and Social Sciences, from 12% to 81% in Mathematics, Physical and Applied Sciences, and from 12% to 76% in Medicine and Life Sciences.

Supporting the global research community  

Our Projekt DEAL agreement showcases the positive consequences for researchers in underfunded disciplines who, through the TA, can now publish OA, and we see the same trends across our other agreements.

Agreements also benefit early-career researchers, who often have limited access to funding, supporting their career progression with greater reach and visibility for their work.

“To maximize the societal impact of research, it is important to have quick access to the results of published work to facilitate timely discussions and feedback. In this regard, OA is advantageous for researchers as it allows them to advance and progress both in their research and professionally.”

- Dr. Mihri Ozkan, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Riverside

Our commitment to enabling equitable OA forms part of a broader effort to ensure diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) across the research publishing landscape. TAs are expanding readership diversity and accessibility. As shown in this blog, our OA authors are more widely read and cited, but this engagement comes from a much broader community. In 2023, 70% of TA content downloads came from ‘anonymous users’, meaning that they were not identifiable through institutional subscriptions or other tracked means. This suggests that without OA, these readers would not have previously had access to this content under subscription agreements. OA is therefore, helping to close the gap between traditional academic communities and more diverse global audiences, ensuring that everyone can benefit from scientific progress.

“I believe OA publishing is part of a much-needed push for greater equity across academia and across the world. Publishing research OA means giving more people the opportunity to read your work who would otherwise not have had the chance or means to do so. I hope that agreements, like the Jisc Transformative Agreement, will become more widespread to support the wider uptake of OA."

- Oliver Hauser, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Exeter Business School, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, and Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute

Ultimately, OA and open science not only increase the accessibility of your research but also promote deeper understanding and collaboration, allowing researchers everywhere to build on your work. Through TAs and a commitment to equity, Springer Nature is widening access and advancing the global research ecosystem.

Learn more about paying for OA APCs through your institution