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What is SpringerOpen?

Giving authors in all areas of science the opportunity to publish open access

SpringerOpen is Springer's portfolio of fully open access journals and books, covering all areas of science. The entire content published with SpringerOpen is freely 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 quality standards

SpringerOpen publications are subject to high-level peer review, editorial, author and production services, ensuring the quality and reliability of the work.

Publishing with SpringerOpen enables authors to retain copyright

Authors publishing with SpringerOpen retain the copyright to their work, licensing it under a Creative Commons license. Our SpringerOpen journals are published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license which allows articles to be freely downloaded from the SpringerOpen website, and to be re-used and re-distributed without restriction, as long as the original work is correctly cited. Our SpringerOpen books are published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY-NC) license, so they can be re-used and re-distributed for non-commercial purposes, as long as the original work is properly cited.

SpringerOpen publications have an increased visibility through different platforms

SpringerOpen journals and books are freely and permanently available online at SpringerLink, the world’s most comprehensive online collection of STM content. In addition, SpringerOpen articles are freely available on the SpringerOpen website and are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), increasing visibility and discoverability. Our SpringerOpen books are included in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB).

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 journals. Although most of our journals are relatively new, the majority are tracked by Thomson Reuters (ISI), and some already have notable Impact Factors.

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 relies on restricting access to published research, in order to recoup the costs of the publication process. In the open access publishing model publication is treated as the last phase of the research process. An open access fee covers the cost of the publication process to allow free and immediate access to the research published. Open access fees 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, open access fees ensure that the publishing system can scale to cope with an ever increasing volume of research.

Springer is committed to showing that open access provides a viable publishing model in addition to traditional subscription-based publishing.