Open Choice: Your research. Your choice.

Open Choice © Maksim Kabakou, iStockphotoOpen Choice allows you to publish open access in more than 1850 Springer journals, making your research more visible and accessible, immediately on publication.


Open Choice benefits 

  • Increased researcher engagement: Open Choice enables access by anyone with an internet connection, immediately on publication. 
  • Higher visibility and greater impact: In Springer hybrid journals, open access articles are accessed 4 times more often on average, and cited 1.6 more times on average*. 
  • Easy compliance with funder and institutional mandates: Many funders require open access publishing, and some take compliance into account when assessing future grant applications.
  • Automatic export triggered to PubMed Central/Europe PubMed Central (PMC); if applicable. 

How can readers tell your articles are Open Choice?

When searching for your article on SpringerLink, readers will find them clearly marked as ‘open access’.

The copyright remains with you

  • If authors choose to publish open access with Open Choice, the copyright remains with them.
  • The vast majority of our Open Choice eligible journals publish open access articles under the liberal Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International(CC BY) license. It permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided appropriate credit is given to the original author(s) and the source, a link to the Creative Commons license is included, and it is indicated if any changes were made.
  • For a list of Open Choice eligible journals please refer to our list of journals.
  • A limited number of journals continue to use the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC) license, including those published under the Adis imprint.


* Within the first three years of publication. Springer Nature hybrid journal OA impact analysis, 2018.

How to order Open Choice

After your article has been accepted for publication, you will receive an email with a link to the MyPublication process pages. There you can opt for your article to be published open access.

Publication fee

• Visit our open access funding page to find out how the open access publication charge can be covered.

• Publishing Open Choice articles involves an open access publication fee. You can choose to pay by credit card or to receive an invoice.

• Agreements with some institutions might cover the open access charges if you belong to a participating institution. Click here for more information. Find out if your institution has an agreement with us. 

• The open access publication fee does not replace any other existing journal publication costs, which are billed separately (e.g. surcharges for color figures in print, oversized articles, etc.).

• Customers providing payment from the Americas will be charged in US$. Sales tax will be charged if applicable.
Customers providing payment from Europe, Africa and Asia will be charged in EUR. VAT is not included in the price and will be added, at a standard rate, if applicable.

• Article processing charge (APC) refund policy: Springer Nature will refund an article processing charge (APC) if an error on our part has resulted in a failure to publish an article under the open access terms selected by the authors. This may include the failure to make an article openly available on the journal platform, or publication of an article under a different Creative Commons licence from that selected by the author(s). A refund will only be offered if these errors have not been corrected within 30 days of publication.

If you become aware of an error in the open access status or licensing of your article, please contact the central customer support team immediately.

APCs will not be refunded when articles are retracted as a result of author error or misconduct.

Please note

• Open Choice articles are not included in our Open Access Membership Program. This means that fees for articles published in Springer’s subscription-based journals using the Open Choice option are not covered by your institution’s membership.
• Open Choice articles are not covered by the SpringerOpen waiver fund.
• Once the MyPublication process has been completed, it is no longer possible to cancel Open Choice orders.
• The final published version will be made freely available on PMC/Europe PMC, the full-text archive of scientific literature in the biomedical and life sciences, if the respective journal is on the PMC Journal List. Please note that this service does not include publications in German language. 

• The list prices for institutional licences of Springer Nature hybrid journals are based solely on subscription content volume.
For 2018, we are aligning the adjustment methodology to ensure we have a consistent policy across all Springer Nature hybrid journals, and hybrid academic journals on nature.com and Palgrave Macmillan hybrid journals will adopt the methodology currently used for Springer hybrid journals.  This means that only subscription articles have been factored into the 2018 list price calculations: the OA share of the most recent year (2016) for which we had full data when the 2018 prices were calculated has been applied.  General price increases due to subscription article volume growth have also been applied for 2018, where appropriate. 
Adjustments of the list price based on subscription volume have historically been a part of our business: Since 2010, hybrid academic journals on nature.com and Palgrave Macmillan hybrid journals have adjusted their list prices for institutional licences on a regular basis to take into account changes in the volume of subscription content. Under this policy, journals whose subscription content changed by more than 10% when comparing the previous two years had their institutional licence price adjusted. Springer has also been committed to factoring the Open Choice article uptake into journal subscription prices since 2011. Since 2015, Springer journal list prices have solely reflected subscription article publications. This means that only subscription articles have been factored into the list price calculation, with general price increases due to subscription article volume growth also applied.