New Read & Publish agreement with Springer Nature

After several months of tough negotiations, swissuniversities and the publisher Springer Nature have reached a comprehensive agreement on a new Read & Publish contract (2026–2029) on 10 June 2026. The swissuniversities press release is available online.

The agreement, which can be viewed on the Consortium website, marks a major milestone in the implementation of the national Open Access strategy. It guarantees the UNIGE/HUG community:

• a full read access to the  to the vast majority of the publisher’s journal portfolio,
• an Open Access publication at no additional cost across the entire Springer portfolio, Nature journal inc. (approx. 2,700 journals), including:
• Springer hybrid journals and certain Nature hybrid journals (over 2,000 titles);
• Gold Open Access journals (around 700 titles). 
• an extensive use of artificial intelligence tools to analyse the publisher’s publications for research, teaching and innovation purposes (excluding model training and redistribution to third parties).

As in previous years, a publication quota is maintained for Switzerland as a whole; however, it should be sufficient to cover all published articles.

Find the detailed terms and conditions and the list of journals here: https://www.unige.ch/biblio/en/openaccess/get-published/agreements-with-publishers/. 

Articles accepted by hybrid journals between 1 January and 10 June 2026 will be converted to Open Access in the coming months. Please note, however, that any fees already paid cannot be refunded.

The openaccess(at)unige.ch team is available to answer any questions you may have.