Since November 2006, all EPJ journals have offered an “Open Access” option for papers that have successfully passed the peer-review stage, through the payment of an open access fee prior to publication. Authors who elect to use this option are provided with the same extensive publishing services as those for papers published in the subscription mode, but with the following additional services:
a. The online version of an open access article will be perpetually, universally and freely accessible.
b. The initial copyright holder (by default, the author) is entitled to keep his/her copyright.
Authors wishing to publish an accepted paper as “Open Access” should inform the editorial office of the corresponding EPJ journal, following receipt of the acceptance letter. They will then be contacted regarding the corresponding payments, where applicable. The current standard open access fee is at a special reduced rate of € 1,000 per article. The article will be tagged “Open Access” and will be published and disseminated as such once the payment has been received.
Please note that some of the consortia agreements negotiated by Springer have a built-in open access component. Accepted papers, with at least one author from such an “Open Access affiliation”, will automatically be published open access.
For “open access” papers, authors should use the following license agreement (based on the Creative Commons license) instead of the usual EPJ copyright transfer statement and send it to the responsible production editor.
In order to promote the latest research results rapidly, the “letter” articles in EPJ A and C will automatically be published open access without incurring any fee. For EPJ C an extended Open Access scheme is currently in place.
Authors whose research has been funded by the Wellcome Trust can opt to publish with Open Access. In this case the Open Access fee will be covered by the Wellcome Trust. For more information visit
http://www.springer.com/open+access?SGWID=0-169302-12-641999-0 .
For any group of papers to be published as a “topical” issue, a collective Open Access fee can be negotiated in the framework of the usual contracts for such “topical” issues.
If your research has been funded by the NIH and you want the publisher to deposit the author’s accepted version in PubMed Central on your behalf and have it opened up for the public within 12 months, please go to http://springer.com/nihauthors and fill in the respective form.
If you opt to publish your article with Open Access, depositing it in the public repository is not necessary. For more information visit http://www.springer.com/open+access?SGWID=0-169302-12-467999-0 .
Presently, all sections of this journal are read in over 5,000 institutions worldwide through subscriptions. The journal is further freely available in many so-called developing countries through various initiatives in which the publishers of EPJ participate. Furthermore, since 2005, EPJ has adopted the policy of providing every individual researcher with personalized free access in the (unlikely) case he or she should not have institutional access; see http://www.epj.org/access.html.
The EPJ publishers are prepared to move the EPJ journals to “Open Access-only”, which will entail seeking sponsoring models and the cooperation with funding agencies and consortia that will guarantee long-term financial support for Open Access publishing at realistic article processing fees, while maintaining the efficiency and flexibility of the present system of dissemination of scientific content and metadata in its usual high quality and to the entire spectrum of hosting, abstracting, indexing and archiving services in keeping with international norms and conventions. In particular, EPJ is seeking sponsoring models and joint projects with funding agencies and consortia willing to sponsor all types and categories of papers accepted by the editors of the EPJ journals on the basis of their intrinsic scientific quality and relevance.