NOTE: The Open Access fund is exhausted. For more information, please read the FAQ below "What happens if the annual national fund is exhausted?"

 

The University of Bologna has joined the half-year extension (January-June 2025) national CARE-CRUI agreement signed with Springer. The transformative agreement covers both the subscription fees for accessing the collection subscribed by the University of Bologna, encompassing all Springer, ADIS and Palgrave journals, and the fees for publishing Open Access in the hybrid journals included in the same collection, as well as in hybrid journals that will be converted to Open Access. Therefore, authors can publish Open Access at no additional costs.

The agreement does not cover the costs for publishing Open Access in the journals of Nature and BioMed Central.

 

SUMMARY SHEET FOR PUBLICATION

Agreement duration: January-June 2025. Activated in January 2025.

Requirements for covering publishing costs: elegibility of the corresponding author (see the dedicated FAQ), journal and article type.

List of the eligible journals: 2025 list (see the dedicated FAQ).

Types of eligible articles: Original Papers (Original Researches, Original Articles, Original Papers or Research Papers) and Review Papers.

Available fund: annual limited national fund.

Licence: see the dedicated FAQ. 

Self-archiving mode (Green Open Access): authors can deposit the Author's Accepted Manuscript (AAM) (post-print) version of the articles whose costs are not covered by the agreement, and make it available as Open Access: on the author's personal website, right after the acceptance; in the institutional repository and the funder's repository, after a 12-month embargo period.  

In the registered version, together with a link to the published version on the publisher’s website, this acknowledgement should be included: “This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in [insert journal title]. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/[insert DOI]”.

 

 

FURTHER INFORMATION

Which authors may be eligible?

Only corresponding authors already affiliated with the University of Bologna on the date the article is accepted are eligible, including academics with fixed-term contracts such as PhD students, research fellows, fixed-term assistant professors, specialisation school students, etc.

Authors must submit their contributions via their institutional email address (i.e.: name.surname@unibo.it or name.surname@studio.unibo.it).

Which are the eligible journals?

All hybrid journals included in the complete collection subscribed by the University of Bologna, as well as the hybrid journals that will turn full Open Access, accessible via the SpringerLink platform.

The agreement does not cover the costs for publishing Open Access in the journals of Nature and BioMed Central.

Journals that were already full Open Access when the agreement was signed are not included; in this case, the publishing costs are charged to the authors.

Here is a comprehensive list of the eligible journals, hybrid and full Open Access.

What happens if the annual national fund is exhausted?

The agreement covers the open access publication of a limited number of articles.

In case the annual fund is exhausted, the publisher inhibits on its platform the possibility of requesting the coverage of the open access publishing costs through the transformative agreement, no longer showing the University of Bologna in the list of institutions that have an agreement of this type. Authors can publish their articles under restricted access (without paying any fee) or in Open Access (bearing their own costs).

Under which kind of licence will articles be published?

The standard licence is CC BY, except for a few journals publishing articles under a CC BY-NC licence. Indications about the licences are provided in the journal list. 

Authors retain all rights relating to their articles, which may be deposited in the University of Bologna institutional repository (IRIS) and published on the authors’ personal websites. Open access is granted right after the publication without any embargo period.

When will the article be published Open Access?

The article will be published once the University of Bologna has verified the author's affiliation with the University and has given its approval.

Which costs are excluded from the coverage of the agreement?

Any other publication fees (i.e.: submission fees, color pages, overlength pages fees etc.) are not covered by the agreement.

Where can I find more information about the agreement?