The Big Ten Academic Alliance have reached a two-year agreement with SpringerNature, for unlimited publishing in Springer hybrid publications, one more step in collective action toward the Big Collection. This agreement runs from January 1, 2025 through December 31, 2026. Under this agreement, Indiana University Bloomington authors can publish open access at no charge in hybrid journals under the Springer, Adis, and Palgrave Macmillan imprints as well as academic journals on nature.com and several smaller imprints, but not Nature or any of the Nature-branded titles.
The agreement includes full access to read the entire Springer hybrid journals portfolio for all participating BTAA campuses.
The deal covers Original Papers, Review Papers, Brief Communications, and Continuing Education articles, which are published under a Creative Commons license at no extra charge to the institution or author. It covers publication in hybrid journals under the Springer, Adis, and Palgrave Macmillan imprints as well as academic journals on nature.com and several smaller imprints, but not Nature or any of the Nature-branded titles. Hybrid journals that flip to fully open access during the agreement term will continue to be included as no-cost publishing options. New hybrid journals added during the term are also included. A complete list of eligible journals is available on Springer’s BTAA agreement web page.
To qualify for no-cost OA publication, the article must be accepted between April 1, 2025 and March 31, 2027, and have a responsible corresponding author from Indiana University Bloomington, or another IU campus that is part of the BTAA deal.
Under this agreement, authors can choose from several Creative Commons licenses, which affect how others — including the publisher — can use their work.
If you choose the default CC-BY license, you keep the right to reuse your own work and give broad reuse rights to others, including for commercial purposes, as long as they give proper credit. This means your article can be read, shared, adapted, or included in textbooks, publications, and used for commercial purposes without needing to ask for your permission, as long as you’re credited.
If you choose a more restrictive license — SpringerNature allows CC-BY-NC, CC-BY-NC-ND or CC-BY-ND licenses — others have more limited reuse rights, especially for commercial purposes. However, even with these licenses, Springer Nature still requires you to give them exclusive rights to publish and reuse your article including for commercial purposes. This may limit your own ability to reuse or adapt your work later without obtaining permission from SpringerNature.
You must identify yourself as affiliated with Indiana University Bloomington and use your institutional email address as part of the publishing workflow. You must be the corresponding author for the article to be eligible.
You can still publish your article, even if you do not wish to use this open access option. You can opt-out of the agreement if you wish.
You can contact the IU Bloomington Libraries Scholarly Communication folks at iusw@iu.edu.