Statement on Annals of Forest Science article

Berlin, 6 May 2015

A number of tweets posted by Prof. Luis Apiolaza on 27 April, and by others active on social media, suggest that Springer is charging for access to open access articles published in Annals of Forest Science. After looking into this issue, there is indeed an issue with the status of the article, but this has to do with the background of the journal itself.

Annals of Forest Science is a journal owned by INRA (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique). In 2009, when the article in question first appeared, the journal was being published by another company that allowed readers to read the articles without paying a fee (“free access”). When Springer started working with INRA in 2011 we agreed to add the 2007-2010 archives to SpringerLink, Springer’s online platform, in order to ensure a smooth transition and to give a wider distribution to the most recent articles. Since the copyright was not assigned to the author, and since there is no mention of the licensing used, we incorrectly assumed that the article was not open access.

It is clear that this article was intended to be open access, and it will be made so on SpringerLink as quickly as possible. Anyone that has purchased the article will, of course, be reimbursed.

Please note that we support Green Open Access and we feed all articles from INRA journals to the HAL repository after the 12-month embargo, making the articles freely downloadable there (this is clearly written on the journal’s webpage, with a link to the HAL platform). The article in question can also be found there for free (since 2011).

This has been an oversight, and we apologize for not being more thorough and vigilant.