Discover Life - Transition to fully Open Access: FAQs
Frequently asked questions regarding the transition to fully open access (OA)
What licence will OA articles be published under?
Discover Life will publish OA articles under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, and authors will retain copyright in their OA articles. CC BY is the most open licence available and considered the industry 'gold standard' for open access; it is also preferred by many funders and in some cases required in order to comply with OA policies. More information about CC licensing is available on our journal OA policies page (this opens in a new tab).
What will happen to content already published via the non-OA route?
Where content has already been published via a non-OA route before the title change in January 2024, these articles will be free to access on the journal website under the same licence terms as at present. Since we did not contract with the authors to publish this content under a CC BY licence, these free-to-access articles are not available for onward sharing and reuse in the same way as open access CC BY content. If you wish to re-use an article that does not have a CC BY licence, you can make a request via the ‘reprints and permissions’ link on the article page.
What if I don't have OA funding available? Does that mean I can’t submit to Discover Life?
Springer Nature has a number of OA agreements and memberships (this opens in a new tab) in place with consortia and institutions around the world. If your article is approved as eligible by your institution then it will be published OA and you will not be invoiced by Springer Nature, since the APC will be centrally invoiced to the OA agreement.
There are also many institutions and research funders that provide APC funding for OA authors. You can find more information on our OA funding support service pages (this opens in a new tab), or contact our support service directly (OAfundingpolicy@springernature.com (this opens in a new tab)).
Springer Nature recognises that some authors may not have access to OA funds, and so has discount and waiver policies in place to ensure that no author is prevented from publishing in a fully OA journal because they are unable to fund the APC. You can apply for an APC discount or waiver during the Discover Life submission process. The APC waivers team will then confirm if you are eligible for a waiver or discount. For more information please see the APC waiver information on our journal OA policies page here (this opens in a new tab).
How will this change help authors comply with funder or institutional policies?
As a fully OA journal using a CC BY licence, authors publishing in Discover Life will be able to comply with any funder or institutional OA policy worldwide. A number of funders, including those in the cOAlition S group, require their authors to make their articles immediately available under a CC BY licence, and as such Discover Life articles will be fully compliant with Plan S principles, and there is no risk that authors might choose a non-compliant non-OA publication route. Equally, if authors are supported by funders or institutions that require them to make a version of their manuscript available in a repository, they will be able to share their openly licensed version of record (VOR) into a repository immediately on publication.
Who can I contact with further questions?
If you have any questions about this transition our Open Research author support team is ready to assist (ORsupport@springernature.com (this opens in a new tab)).