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A new Read & Publish agreement with Springer Nature secures broad reading access and cost-free Open Access publishing for researchers at the 4RIs and other Swiss institutions from 2026 to 2029. Negotiated by a working group of swissuniversities and the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries, this agreement brings the full Springer Nature portfolio into a single national framework.
In addition to extensive reading access (all journals published by Springer Nature except for some Nature Reviews journals), corresponding authors affiliated with Eawag, Empa, PSI or WSL can publish Open Access (OA) without costs for them:
Nature Research Hybrid journals and full OA journals have a yearly limit on the number of articles that researchers affiliated with Swiss institutions can publish OA at no additional cost. This "article quota" is currently expected to cover all articles by Swiss researchers, though this depends on actual publishing activity. As with all other publisher agreements, only articles whose corresponding author is affiliated with the 4RIs are eligible for cost-free OA.
The agreement applies to eligible articles accepted after 10 June 2026. For articles accepted earlier this year and published as closed access, Springer Nature will offer authors cost-free conversion to OA. This conversion process will start in the coming weeks and eligible authors will be contacted by Springer Nature. Please note that any OA fees (APCs) already invoiced before 10 June 2026 will not be refunded.
To identify the publishing options for a specific journal, please use the journal search in the Lib4RI Search Tool. For more information on the OA agreements at the 4RIs, see the Lib4RI OA Agreements page.
Please see the swissuniversities press release for further details on the Swiss agreement with Springer Nature.
After careful review and thorough discussion, including within the Lib4RI Steering Committee, the library has decided to participate in this new agreement with Springer Nature. Read & Publish agreements are not without critics, and we believe it is important to be transparent about the benefits, limitations and trade-offs involved.
The most immediate benefit is simplicity. Corresponding authors affiliated with our institutions no longer need to pay article processing charges (APCs) from their own grants or budgets; these costs are now covered centrally through the agreement. Consolidating these expenditures under Lib4RI's central funding also gives us a clearer picture of our total spending with the publisher. Most importantly, your work becomes freely available to readers worldwide upon publication, increasing its visibility and potential impact.
However, these agreements do not solve the underlying problem in scholarly publishing: costs that keep rising far faster than library budgets. While they shift the financial burden away from individual authors, the overall institutional cost remains high. The expanded scope of this agreement — full OA journals and a higher article limit for Nature journals — will double the library's expenditure on Springer Nature within the next four years. The specific arrangement also risks normalising APCs of up to EUR 10'850 for the publication of a single article. More broadly, a pricing model based on per-article publication charges gives the publisher strong leverage to raise prices in the future.
There is also a global equity concern: by replacing the "pay-to-read" barrier with a "pay-to-publish" model, we risk marginalising researchers at underfunded institutions and in low- and middle-income countries that cannot afford such comprehensive institutional agreements.
As discussed previously in Lib4RI Update #21 (2020) and Lib4RI Update #42 (2025), these deals tend to concentrate funding with large, established publishers. This entrenches business models that are financially unsustainable for academic institutions and ultimately strengthens the market position of the academic publishing oligopoly.
The library remains committed to critically evaluating these models. We see this agreement as a pragmatic step to support our authors under current conditions, not as an endorsement of the long-term sustainability or fairness of the underlying system. We will continue to advocate for a more equitable, transparent and financially sustainable scholarly publishing ecosystem.