2 October 2026

The open access agreement with publisher Springer Nature is based on a maximum number of articles per year. On 9 October, the yearly cap will likely be reached of articles for which the open access costs are covered by this agreement. This may affect the open access publication of your article at Springer Nature.

Researchers whose articles are accepted in Springer Nature's journals after this cap has been reached, will be invoiced by the publisher for open access fees if they choose to publish in open access this year. Make sure to avoid any unexpected charges.

What to do if my article gets accepted after the cap has been reached?

If your article is accepted for publication after the moment the cap has been reached, you can still choose to publish your article in open access in 2026. In that case, you are responsible for covering the open access fee, for instance, by funding it from your research grant or via your institute. The University and the LUMC do not have a central budget to cover these publishing costs.

Alternatively, you can choose to not publish in open access at Springer Nature 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.

For more options, please see the page on Caps in open access.

If you have any questions about these options, please contact the university library's open access team, at openaccess@library.leidenuniv.nl.

More information or questions

 

• Some agreements with other publishers have a comparable maximum number of articles they cover. The webpage 'Caps in open access' contains more information on these 'caps', the expected dates they will be reached and which alternatives are available.
• 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 Notify-me service  to receive updates on the agreements and their impending caps. 

• Any questions about open access publishing? Please consult the open access pages on the university library website, or contact the university library's open access team via openaccess@library.leidenuniv.nl.