Springer Nature continues open access drive in Latin America
Publisher agrees its first TA in Mexico with Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) signaling increasing momentum and support for OA across the Americas
London, 28th November 2022
Springer Nature has today agreed its first transformative agreement (TA) in Mexico with partner Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), in Mexico. The TA is also the largest institutional TA for Latin America to date, showing extended support for open access (OA) across the Americas. It follows the publishers’ first TAs in Canada and Latin America - Colombia - earlier this year, and its landmark agreement with the University of California in 2020. These agreements show clear commitment across all Americas to OA and increase the reach and impact for their research outputs.
With this agreement, over 30,000 affiliated researchers will now be able to publish OA, at no cost to them, benefiting from higher usage, download and citation rates, and therefore reach and impact of their work, that OA has been proven to achieve.
Maria Lopes, Vice President, Institutional Sales, Springer Nature commented:
“With agreements in place in Canada, the US and Colombia, we have seen the development of sustainable models for the regions, ensuring open science can continue to grow and thrive in the Americas. We are delighted to have been able to agree our first deal in Mexico with UNAM and strengthen our longstanding partnership. We remain focused on facilitating global open access and supporting academic collaboration, discoverability and usability at scale.”
Running from 2022 to 2024, the TA will include read access to over 2.300 journals across the Springer, Adis and Nature portfolios. It will enable affiliated researchers to publish OA, in over 1900 Springer Nature journals, with an expected 1.000 articles to be published Gold OA during its term.
The publisher’s 17 national agreements, which alongside its institutional deals, now support researchers from over 2,650 affiliated institutions to publish OA, enabling an expected 41,400+ OA articles to be published a year via these routes. This shows that TAs are the fastest way to enable the OA transition. They enable more authors to publish OA and offer authors an easy way to comply with funders’ OA requirements, whilst enabling participating institutions to better manage the cost and administration of OA by combining journal subscription (read) access along with OA publication costs (APCs).
In addition, earlier this year Springer Nature released a report which demonstrated the impact that publishing in its fully OA portfolio can have for authors, with research receiving higher usage, downloads and citations than any other fully OA publisher.
Springer Nature continues to support all authors regardless of discipline, location or funding, to publish OA. More about the publisher's commitment to OA and open research can be found here and here.
What is a transformative agreement (TA)?
Definition: TAs enable participating institutions to combine journal subscription (read) access along with open access (OA) publication costs (APCs). In addition to managing the cost and administration of OA, TAs offer authors an easy way to comply with funders’ OA requirements.
Description: Under a transformative agreement subscription access and OA publishing are brought together into one reading and publishing contract across a consortium of institutions. This means that researchers in those institutions can publish under the “gold” open access model, while also gaining access to research in subscription journals. Spearheaded by Springer Nature with the first such agreement signed with the Association of Dutch Universities, VSNU, Netherlands in 2014, these agreements make the administration of OA simpler for both the institutions participating and their researchers. In addition, these agreements enable a wider group of researchers to benefit from the enhanced discoverability, increased citation and increased usage of OA content, help to solve the problem that some academic disciplines lack OA funding (a centralised APC allows any researcher from the participating institution, regardless of academic discipline, to publish OA), and also provide researchers with an easy way to comply with funders’ OA requirements.
For over 180 years Springer Nature has been advancing discovery by providing the best possible service to the whole research community. We help researchers uncover new ideas, make sure all the research we publish is significant, robust and stands up to objective scrutiny, that it reaches all relevant audiences in the best possible format, and can be discovered, accessed, used, re-used and shared. We support librarians and institutions with innovations in technology and data; and provide quality publishing support to societies.
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Katie Baker | Head of Communications Springer Nature | katie.baker@springernature.com
