News Release

Springer permits commercial use for its hybrid open access program

Springer Open Choice adopts the Creative Commons Attribution License

Business Announcement

Springer

Springer is bringing Open Choice, its hybrid open access option, into line with the fully open access journals published by BioMed Central and SpringerOpen. As a result, all open access content at Springer will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license.

In 2004, the hybrid open access option Open Choice was launched at Springer with the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license. Springer's Open Choice option allows authors to publish their articles with open access for the majority of its subscription-based journals. The articles are immediately freely available for anyone worldwide in exchange of paying an article processing charge. The copyright remains with the author.

Bettina Goerner, Manager Open Access at Springer, says: "The positive experience with publish-ing fully open access journals under the CC-BY license at BioMed Central and SpringerOpen, lead us to believe that permitting commercial use has benefits to our authors, editors, society partners and open access in general. We are pleased that our Open Choice option to publish open access meets the growing demand for liberal re-use rights."

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In addition to Open Choice, Springer offers fully open access journals under the SpringerOpen brand. The portfolio of more than 60 journals was recently joined by SpringerPlus, an interdiscip-linary open access journal, publishing research in all STM disciplines.

More information about:

Springer Open Choice (http://www.springer.com/openchoice)

Springer and Open Access (http://www.springer.com/openaccess)

Springer Science+Business Media (http://www.springer.com) is a leading global scientific publisher, delivering quality content through innovative information products and services. The company is also a trusted provider of local-language professional publications in Europe, especially in Ger-many and the Netherlands. In the science, technology and medicine (STM) sector, the group publishes around 2,000 journals and more than 7,000 new books a year, as well as the largest STM eBook Collection worldwide. Springer has operations in about 20 countries in Europe, the USA, and Asia, and more than 5,500 employees. In 2010, it generated annual sales of around EUR 866 million.


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