What is SpringerOpen?

SpringerOpen is Springer's new range of fully open access journals, which cover all disciplines within the science, technology, and medicine (STM) fields, giving authors in all areas of science the opportunity to publish open access.

The entire content published in a SpringerOpen journal is freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication. SpringerOpen views open access to research as essential in order to ensure the rapid and efficient communication of research findings.

SpringerOpen is committed to maintaining high standards through full and stringent peer review

All research articles published in a SpringerOpen journal receive rapid and thorough peer review. The detailed peer-review policy of each journal is the responsibility of the journal editor(s) concerned.

Many SpringerOpen journals are citation-tracked and some already have Impact Factors

SpringerOpen recognizes the important role played by Impact Factors and other citation-based metrics in governing scientists' decisions about where to publish their research. Regular effort is being made to ensure effective citation tracking of SpringerOpen's journals. The majority of SpringerOpen journals are tracked by Thomson Reuters (ISI), and some journals already have notable Impact Factors.

All research articles published in a SpringerOpen journal may be freely accessed, re-used and re-distributed

Authors publishing in a SpringerOpen journal retain the copyright to their work, licensing it under the Creative Commons Attribution License. This license allows articles to be freely downloaded from the SpringerOpen website, and also allows articles to be re-used and re-distributed without restriction, as long as the original work is correctly cited.

SpringerOpen supports several international archives and digital repositories, and encourages self-archiving by authors

All research articles published in a SpringerOpen journal are archived without delay in several international archives. SpringerOpen also allows authors to immediately deposit the official, final version of their published article in any suitable digital repository. Several institutions and research funders have introduced official policies requesting or requiring their authors to deposit the articles they publish in a central archive. SpringerOpen fully supports these deposition policies and is compliant with them.

Open access is a sustainable publication model

The traditional business model for scientific publishers relies on restricting access to published research, in order to recoup the costs of the publication process. This restriction of access to published research prevents full use being made of digital technologies, and is contrary to the interests of authors, funders and the scientific community as a whole. The traditional subscription-based model is also becoming increasingly unsustainable, as increasing amounts of research is being published whilst library budgets remain static.

In contrast, SpringerOpen's open access publishing model treats publication as the last phase of the research process. Article-processing charges (APCs) cover the cost of the publication process to allow free and immediate access to the research articles. APCs ensure transparency and allow publishers to compete to provide the best service at the best price. By coupling the cost of publication to research budgets, APCs ensure that the journal publishing system can scale to cope with an ever increasing volume of research.

SpringerOpen is committed to showing that open access provides a viable alternative that better fits the needs of the scientific community.