Collection updates

Agreement duration: The UNSW agreement is from 1st January 2022 - 31st December 2025 or until the annual publication cap is reached. NB: in 2024 this was from 29 October.

Please note, UNSW corresponding authors can simply comply with the Open Access policy by retaining the rights to the Author Accepted Manuscript and depositing a copy into UNSWorks (via ROS) using a CC-BY licence.

Summary: Springer Nature curates a large number of journals, books and databases across the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and humanities disciplines. The agreement will allow UNSW affiliated authors to publish their research open access in over 2,000 hybrid journals, across the Springer, Palgrave Macmillan and Adis portfolios and in the Academic Journals on nature.com. Hybrid journals that 'flip' to OA during the course of this agreement will remain available for OA publishing for the duration of the agreement. NB: Fully open journals are not part of this agreement including BMC journals, SpringerOpen journals and NATURE branded journals - npj, Communications journals, Nature Review and Nature Research journals. UNSW Library has another OA publishing agreement for Nature Research journals.

Titles included: 2025 Springer Nature Read and Publish Title List 

Acceptance date: Eligible articles that have an acceptance date during each annual term of this agreement or up to the annual publication cap are eligible to be published open access under the terms of the agreement. 

Number of included articles: The number of included articles for 2025 is approximately 3,511 across all participating institutions. Once the allowance is used corresponding authors of any additional articles accepted in 2025 may choose to publish articles as "closed access" or to pay an APC for the article to be published open access.

Information for authors: See the Springer Nature website for more information. Further, UNSW corresponding authors must use their UNSW institutional email address (name@unsw.edu.au) to be eligible under this agreement. This agreement allows researchers to publish open access under a CC BY or CC BY-NC licence. Page and colour charges do not apply. Rapid service fees not included in the agreement. 

For journal response times between submission and acceptance you should check the specific journal guidelines for accurate information.

Eligible article types: Original Paper, Review Paper, Brief Communication, Continuing Education.

How to submit your article for open access publishing: 

1. Manuscript is submitted. Submitting author provides e.g. FundRef and ORCID information. Article category is assigned. 
2. The submitted article will go through thorough peer review.
3. After editorial acceptance, the corresponding author is able to identify themselves as affiliated to a member institution. 
4. Corresponding author identifies themselves as connected to a member institution. The institution's OA agreement eligibility determines if the journal and article type are in scope for OA publication.
5. The author can now complete the remainder of the production process and the article is published open access. Further details are available on the publisher’s website.
6. To comply with the Open Access policy the UNSW corresponding author will need to retain the rights to either the Published Version of Record or Author Accepted Manuscript, and deposit into UNSWorks using a CC BY licence.
7. The APC will then be waived for authors who 
   • used their UNSW institutional email address and
   • selected UNSW as their institutional affiliation from a drop down list.

Corresponding authors should not use personal email addresses (e.g. Hotmail, Gmail) or email addresses affiliated with other organisations, research centres or institutes. Otherwise they may be ineligible under the terms of this agreement.

For any queries about this open access publishing agreement please use this short form.