Agreement with Lyrasis and Springer Nature covers 120 institutions including Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Lyrasis and Springer Nature have reached a new Read-and-Publish (R&P) Agreement, also known as a Transformative Agreement (TA). The four-year deal covers some 120 institutions and includes eight Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and eight other federally designated minority serving institutions, allowing all participating schools to benefit from greater access to articles and funded publishing opportunities. The agreement will allow more than 5,000 articles in the Springer hybrid portfolio to be published immediately in open access at no cost to eligible researchers.
A welcome development in a well-established relationship, this new R&P Agreement builds upon prior agreements between Springer Nature and Lyrasis such as the 2021 Open Access (OA) sponsorship partnership for books supporting research and teaching aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals. More information about the new R&P offer is available on the Lyrasis website as well as at a dedicated Springer Nature webpage.
Maria Lopes, Springer Nature’s Vice President of Research Sales for North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, said: “We are delighted to build on our long-standing relationship with Lyrasis via this new agreement that will make it possible for authors at 120 institutions to publish their entire output open access. It is via TAs such as this that we can drive equity, increase readership and author visibility, and foster collaborative research that delivers solutions to pressing issues. TAs play a vital role in enabling a transition to open science and with each one, we cement our joint commitment to that goal.”
Marilyn Hendricks, Executive Licensing Manager at Springer Nature, added: “In order to access opportunities, researchers need to be exposed to specific content. Generally speaking, HBCUs have not had such access. This TA is important in allowing these schools to begin building up their publishing impact. It also enables Black college students to have access to the same content as their peers at non-HBCU institutions.”
Celeste Feather, Senior Director of Content and Scholarly Communication Initiatives at Lyrasis, said: “The Springer Nature journals group at Lyrasis includes a diverse array of institutions that are collaborating at scale to support open access publishing. Research institutions, regional universities, liberal arts colleges, medical schools, HBCUs and minority-serving institutions have come together in response to the needs of their communities. We are eager to see the impact of their efforts as authors engage with new publishing opportunities.”