Funder Compliance

Our open access journal and book options allow you to easily comply with the open access requirements of your institution, government and funding body. Almost all Springer journals, and our open access books published via the Springer imprint offer a gold open access option, which is fully compatible with many funder mandates and allows the official published version of the article, book or book chapter to be archived and distributed with no embargo, under a Creative Commons licence.

We have OA policy compliance advice for journal article and book authors supported by research funders or institutions on our Springer Nature OA funding and support pages.Visit our OA policy compliance FAQs (journals/books) or OA funding and policy checklist (journals/books) to learn more.

For authors publishing via the subscription route, more information about how you can self-archive your Springer accepted manuscript can be found on our Open Research policy pages for journals and books.

If you are employed or funded by the US National Institute of Health (NIH), please find more detailed information on compliance in Springer journals below.

If you choose to publish your article as open access within the Springer Open Choice program, Springer automatically deposits the final published version of your article into PubMed Central and it is made publicly accessible, if the article meets the PMC deposition guidelines. In order to ensure your article is identified as eligible for deposit, please indicate that you have received NIH funding when entering your funding information within the peer review system. See here under “Self-archiving, manuscript deposition, and digital preservation” for full details. The copyright will remain with you and the article will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

If you choose to publish your article with the traditional subscription-based model (without open access), you can notify Springer to deposit the accepted manuscript version of your article into the NIH Manuscript Submission System, from where it will be sent to PubMed Central and made publicly available 12 months after publication.

To notify Springer, please complete our form. We require your full NIH grant number and can only process requests with a full and properly formed grant number. An example would be: ‘R01 GM012345-03’.

You only need to enter one NIH grant number. The additional one(s) can be included in a later stage.

We will upload the accepted manuscript version of your article to the NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS). Note that the uploaded article version corresponds to the final manuscript after peer-review and thus, does not include any corrections you will carry out at a later stage (e.g. during proofing).

Once your article is uploaded, you will receive email notification from NIHMS, asking you for approval of the upload to PubMed Central. When you have approved the upload, a web version of the article will be created by PubMed Central. Upon your approval of the web version, the PMCID will be created and can be found in the NIHMS. As soon as the article is displayed at PubMed Central, you will be able to find the PMCID by searching for your article.

If you have any questions about the NIH deposition process, please contact the Springer Nature NIH Funding team at NIHFUNDING@springernature.com.

Please note that all PubMed Central content is mirrored at Europe PubMed Central. If we submit your article to PubMed Central, it will appear in Europe PubMed Central as well.

If you are employed by the NIH you cannot transfer your copyright to the publisher. Our publishing workflow is perfectly ready to meet this need and will allow you to fully comply.

NIH intramural authors also need to submit the accepted manuscript to the NIHMS via http://www.nihms.nih.gov/ themselves, so that it is available on PMC 12 months after official publication. Please visit our self-archiving policy information for further details.