KAIST has signed an open access (OA) transformative agreement (TA) with Springer Nature on October 20. The TA will allow KAIST researchers to publish their articles without paying any fees in over 2,000 Springer Nature hybrid journals.

Established in 2015, Springer Nature is a leading global publisher home to renowned journals such as Springer, Nature, and Scientific American. They have a strong reputation in the academic community for the quality of their work, with over 124,000 OA articles available.

KAIST has been working towards the TA with Springer Nature since 2020, beginning with the OA Task Force from the KAIST Library. The lack of awareness among researchers about OA publishing was one of the significant hurdles of this project according to Boram Lee of the KAIST Library. To address that, an open access information page was created on the KAIST Library website. Moreover, the OA Task Force collaborated with the KAIST Strategic Research Planning Team to promote the OA Paper Publication Support Project which is also available on the KAIST Library website.

“This TA will convert reading fees to publishing fees, and provide an opportunity to widely share excellent research results by allowing anyone around the world to access KAIST's research without any barriers or restrictions,” Lee stated. Publishing OA articles will provide KAIST researchers with a chance to widen their reach. A larger audience will be able to view their work, which promotes the possibility of future collaborative work. Moreover, OA articles have been shown to receive increased citations and usage than those with limited access. The increase in citations is not only beneficial to the researchers but also to KAIST’s external research performance.

In addition to free publishing, the TA with Springer Nature also provides subscription access to their journals. From 2024 to 2026, KAIST researchers will have access to approximately 2,350 Springer Nature journals for free.

KAIST is currently the only institution in Korea to have signed an OA TA with Springer Nature. Among Springer Nature’s 39 global partners, KAIST is one of only two located in Asia. In the future, KAIST plans to pursue TAs with other publishers such as Wiley, ACM, RSC, and CSHL.