Springer Nature and OASE have signed a new agreement that expands open access publishing opportunities for institutions in Japan starting in 2026. The agreement will run from 2026 to 2028 and is intended to support universities and national research and development organizations that have expressed interest in participating in OASE’s transformative agreement framework. It will provide these institutions with the option to fully or partially transition to open access publishing. At present, 83 institutions have confirmed participation beginning in 2026.
It is expected that researchers affiliated with the participating institutions will be able to publish approximately 3,000 open access articles in more than 2,000 Springer hybrid journals in 2026. Participating institutions will also receive access to the Springer Journal Package, which contains approximately 2,200 journals, along with journals from Palgrave Macmillan, Adis, and Academic Journals on nature.com for which the institution holds subscriptions.
OASE has indicated that the organization operates under Japan’s ‘National Policy on Promoting Open Access to Publicly Funded Scholarly Publications and Scientific Data’ and has been working to strengthen institutional commitment to broader dissemination of research. The organization has noted that the new agreement builds on the outcomes of the pilot transformative agreement launched in 2023 and views multiple pathways as important for advancing open access. OASE has also stated that the agreement is expected to serve as a practical measure toward more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable open publishing, and that it plans to continue assessing its impact and sharing insights and lessons learned with the community.
Springer Nature has reported that the agreement supports Japan’s transition to open access and that open access publishing can increase visibility, citations, and public engagement with research. The organization has also stated that more than 50% of its primary research in 2024 has been published open access and that transformative agreements have enabled 10 times more gold open access articles compared to those published outside such agreements. The new agreement will replace and expand the pilot transformative agreement previously signed with the Research University Consortium (RUC) and J-SPRINTA in Japan.
Springer Nature has highlighted that data from transformative agreements in Japan show that, among participating institutions, the number of open access journal articles published in the first year of participation increased by approximately four times compared to the preceding year. The organization has further reported that, on average, open access articles are downloaded more than 4.4 times and receive Altmetric attention scores approximately 10.7 times higher than non-open access articles. The organization has expressed that the collaboration with OASE aligns with shared goals to promote open access in ways that meet the needs of researchers in Japan and that openly available research contributes to accelerating solutions to global challenges.
The calculation referenced above compares the total number of papers published via open access in hybrid journals covered by open access publishing under the transition agreement at 38 institutions that began participating in 2023 or 2024, assessing the change from the year prior to participation to the first year of participation.
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