Five facts to know about Open Choice

Interested in publishing your research open access but not sure what that entails? Here are five things you should know about Open Choice at Springer Nature.

1. It’s your choice: The majority of Springer’s subscription journals offer an open access (OA) option via the “Open Choice” program. What we mean by “it’s your choice” is you the author choose whether to publish your article under the open access or subscription model.
2. You don’t necessarily cover the costs yourself: Springer charges an article processing charge (APC) of EUR 2,200/USD 3,000 for an Open Choice article. But did you know that over 200 partner institutions cover the APCs for their affiliated authors?
3. Standards apply: Your article must still go through rigorous peer review just like the rest. It is only upon acceptance that you are able to opt for Open Choice and agree to the OA copyright and license terms.
4. You keep the copyright: By agreeing to our copyright and license terms, you as the author retain the copyright to your work and the article maybe shared and distributed under liberal reuse license terms.
5. Your paper becomes freely accessible:  If you choose OA your paper becomes freely accessible and shareable to and from anyone worldwide, immediately upon publication.

Moreover, OA publishing enables you to further expand the distribution of your paper by depositing the final version of the article in any repository/on any website immediately upon publication, a  requirement of some funders (so-called OA mandates). The vast majority of Open Choice articles are published under the terms of the liberal Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. The CC BY license facilitates the re-use distribution and reproduction in any medium.

Are you an author in the biomedical and life sciences fields? There’s one more fact for you to know: You benefit from an OA article upload service to the fulltext archive PMC/Europe PMC (for its evaluation).

Resources:

www.springer.com/openchoice

Open Access funding information

www.springer.com/oafunding

Websites dedicated to our OA agreement partners

www.springer.com/oaforuk

www.springer.com/oafornl

www.springer.com/oaforaustria

www.springer.com/oaformpg

This piece was co-authored by Celia Carver