Montclair State University Libraries has announced an expansion of open-access (OA) publishing opportunities for its researchers through new agreements with Springer Nature and Annual Reviews. These initiatives aim to broaden access to scholarly work, enabling researchers to publish without direct costs while increasing the visibility of their research.
Montclair State University has entered into an agreement with Springer Nature through its participation in the Lyrasis consortium, allowing affiliated authors to publish open-access articles in select journals at no charge through 2027. This agreement covers over 2,000 hybrid and open-access journals under the Springer, Nature Academic, Palgrave Macmillan, and Adis imprints.
To qualify for open-access publication under this agreement, submissions must meet the following criteria:
• The corresponding author must be affiliated with Montclair State University, using an institutional email address or submitting from a university IP address.
• The manuscript must be accepted by an eligible hybrid journal within the Springer portfolio.
• Eligible article types include original papers, brief communications, review articles, and continuing education papers.
Further details about the Springer Nature agreement, including a guide for authors, licensing information, and the list of eligible journals, can be accessed through the University Libraries' open-access resources. It should be noted that Nature portfolio journals and BMC journals are not included in this agreement.
Montclair State University Libraries also participates in the Annual Reviews Subscribe to Open (S2O) initiative, which supports the transition of subscription-based journals to open access. Under this model, institutional subscriptions remain in place, and once sufficient funding thresholds are met, new journal volumes are made openly available under a Creative Commons license.
Since 2023, Annual Reviews publications that have achieved the required subscription support have converted to open access. Journals from the 2025 publication cycle are currently in production and, with continued institutional participation, are expected to become openly available as they are published.
Through the S2O framework, the most recent nine volumes of a journal remain accessible to all readers once a title transitions to open access. If subscription support falls short, paywall restrictions are maintained for that volume.
Montclair State University researchers can explore additional open-access publishing agreements through the University Libraries’ Open Access Guide. For publications not covered by these agreements, authors are encouraged to deposit postprints or author manuscripts in Digital Commons, the university’s institutional repository. Content uploaded to Digital Commons is indexed by Google Scholar and discoverable through academic databases.
For more information on publishing open access, researchers can contact Siobhan McCarthy, Scholarly Communications Librarian, at mccarthys@montclair.edu.
Click here to read the original press release.
