Open access and the mission of the academic library | For Librarians | Springer Nature

"Academic institutions are mission-driven organizations, dedicated to advancing scholarship, knowledge, and research. Libraries have always played a key role in this mission, providing access to the best research for their community and preserving that knowledge for future generations. Open access (OA) agreements help to fund researchers publishing fees, reduce administration and simplify workflows for librarians. With these agreements comes new responsibilities such as approving payments and monitoring publishing output.

Like many academic publishers, Springer Nature is supporting libraries to make the transition to OA with the introduction of new business models such as OA agreements. These agreements cover publishing fees for authors from participating institutions and aim to accelerate the transition to OA. One type of OA agreement is a transformative agreement (TA) which combines reading and OA publication fees in hybrid journals into one single license.

As part of this change, Springer Nature is committed to collecting and disseminating knowledge about how the transition is working for librarians in different regions, from different institutions, and in different subject areas. In 2023, Springer Nature commissioned the case study A commitment to the global research community: Three US organizations reflect on their transition to open access, to explore the experiences of the following three organizations as they were actively participating in TAs and moving towards OA; Carnegie Mellon University, California Digital Library, and the SCELC Library Consortium...."