5 September 2025

The open access agreement with the medical publisher Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW) is based on a maximum number of articles per year. The yearly cap for open access articles published at LWW has been reached per 5^th September 2025. This may affect open access publication of your article at LWW.

Researchers whose articles are accepted between now and 31^st December 2025, will be invoiced by the publisher for open access fees if they choose to publish still this year in open access with the publisher. Make sure to avoid any unexpected charges.

What to do if your article gets accepted now?

If your article is accepted for publication by LWW after the cap has been reached, you can still choose to publish your article in open access in 2025 if you have funds to cover the open access fee. You could try to pay the publication fees through, for instance, your research grant of via your institute. The University and the LUMC do not have a central budget to cover these publication fees.

Alternatively, you could choose to not publish in open access at LWW and instead make the published version of the article openly available in the Leiden repository Scholarly Publications six months after publication. This is permitted under article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act (the ‘Taverne’ Amendment).

You are also encouraged to make a version of the article open access by posting a preprint or a postprint/Author Accepted Manuscript in the Leiden repository Scholarly Publications or on a platform suitable for your research.

We strongly recommend all authors whose manuscript is accepted by LWW after date the cap is reached, to contact the University Library’s open access team via openaccess@library.leidenuniv.nl to help you navigate the options available.

Maximum for open access publications other publishers

We expect to reach a similar maximum with other publishers at:

• American Chemical Society (ACS) – early October 2025
• Taylor & Francis – mid October 2025
• Springer Nature – November 2025
• Oxford University Press – October/November 2025

For other publishers, there is no maximum included in the open access agreement or we do not expect the maximum to be achieved this year. Articles accepted as of January 1, 2026 will be covered by next year's agreement.

Notification service

If you would like to be informed about the yearly open access maximum of the agreements which have caps in place, please register for the notification service to receive updates on the agreements and their impending caps.

Questions?

For any questions about publishing in open access, please check information about open access on our website or contact the University Library’s open access team via openaccess@library.leidenuniv.nl.