Resumption of Springer Open Access Publishing in 2026

Springer has confirmed the resumption of its open access publishing program for 2026. Corresponding authors affiliated with national research institutions have been granted the opportunity to publish 1,381 open access articles free of charge in over 1,930 hybrid journals and approximately 60 fully open access journals published by Springer.

Detailed information about Springer’s open access publishing program is available on the WBN website: wbn.icm.edu.pl/publikowanie-otwarte/#springer_oa 

• Springer Open Publishing Program – Virtual Library of Science
• Open Access Systems Solution presentation
• List of Springer journals covered by the program (xlsx for download) 
• Author eligibility workflow presentation

Terms of use of the Springer publishing program:

• affiliation of the corresponding author with an institution covered by the license (the corresponding author should include in the article header an affiliation with an institution eligible for the program; this may be one of multiple affiliations listed in any order),
• the article must successfully pass peer review and be accepted for publication,
• the article must be accepted in one of approximately 1,980 hybrid journals or 33 fully open access journals included in the list of over 2,000 journals (xlsx for download) covered by the program; the program does not include gold open access journals BioMed Central and SpringerOpen,
• the program covers the following article types: OriginalPaper, ReviewPaper, BriefCommunication, and ContinuingEducation; the program does not cover: EditorialNotes, News, Letters,
• the fee under the program covers only the basic cost; any additional services are paid outside the program by the author, e.g. paper offprints, posters, color figures in the print version.

Recommendations:

• eligibility for funding of publication costs is determined by the order in which articles are accepted for publication,
• the primary open access license offered by Springer is the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY),
• European research funding institutions, including NCN, recommend using licenses that ensure the broadest possible freedom of reuse (Creative Commons Attribution – CC-BY).

Program initiation:

The corresponding author submitting the article receives an email from the publisher confirming acceptance for publication. The email contains a link to the Open Access Systems Solution, where the publication model can be selected.

Recommendations on the use of AI:
Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Contact regarding the Springer open publishing program:

Springer Nature: oa.verification@springer.com
Virtual Library of Science: wbn@icm.edu.pl
Open access agreement for Poland. Information for authors