Skip to Main Content

CWRU Open Access Agreements and Other Funding

CWRU authors are able to publish open access at no cost in select journals through agreements with several publishers. This guide provides details on each agreement for CWRU authors as well as alternative no cost options and funding possibilities..

Springer Article Limit

As of September 2nd, 29% of the 2025 calendar year allocation of Open Access fee-waived articles remains for Springer.

Our Springer deal has a maximum number of articles per year that may be published as Open Access under this agreement. When the 2025 calendar year limit is reached, corresponding authors will no longer see the option to publish Open Access at no charge during their article publishing process. Corresponding authors have two options: 1) they can choose to publish Open Access on their own and pay the APC, or 2) they can choose to publish the article under the traditional subscription access model at no charge, then submit the Accepted [peer reviewed] manuscript version to CWRU's open access repository, Scholarly Commons. For more information on submitting to Scholarly Commons, contact scholarlycomm@case.edu.

Last year, we reached this limit by October and expect to reach it again by then or sooner. If you are submitting a manuscript, please note that the acceptance date determines your eligibility, so articles accepted after we reach the limit will not be covered by the agreement.

Starting in January 2024, CWRU authors through OhioLINK will have the ability to publish open access (OA) in eligible hybrid journals* published by Springer (including many Springer, Palgrave, Adis, and academic journals at nature.com) at no cost to either the author or the institution. This means that CWRU authors can publish an article as open access without paying any Article Publication Charge (APC).

*Nature portfolio journals such as Nature itself and Scientific American are not included. Fully open-access journals are also not included.

To be eligible:

  • Must be accepted for publication between January 1, 2024 - December 31, 2026
  • Publishing in eligible hybrid journal (see list link below)
  • Corresponding author must be affiliated with CWRU

Note: There is a statewide article limit each calendar year (Jan-Dec). Once we reach the article limit for a given year, we can no longer offer OA APC coverage. This is a first-come-first-serve opportunity. In 2024, we reached our article cap limit for Springer in September.

If your article meets the eligibility criteria, the publisher's system will offer the no-cost OA publishing option at acceptance. Learn more about this process below.

Springer Publishing Process

  1. Article accepted. Article is accepted for publication in a hybrid journal. The corresponding author receives an email invitation to complete the publication process for their article.
  2. Article identification. Authors identify themselves by one of three data elements:
    • Selected institution
    • Institutional email
    • Location
  3. Selecting OA. For articles that have been identified as eligible to be covered by an OA agreement, the corresponding author will be presented with confirmation that they can publish OA with their fees covered.
  4. License. The author is asked to agree to an OA creative commons license on behalf of all co-authors.
  5. Publication. The OA article is freely available for anyone in the world to read, share and re-use.