The CC BY licence is the most open licence available and considered the industry 'gold standard' for OA; it is also preferred by many funders. It lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. It offers maximum dissemination and use of licenced materials. All Springer Nature journals with OA options offer the CC BY licence, and this is now the default licence for the majority of Springer Nature fully OA journals. It is also the default license for OA books and chapters.
A preprint is a version of a scientific manuscript posted on a public server prior to formal peer review. Once posted, the preprint becomes a permanent part of the scientific record, citable with its own unique DOI. Early sharing is recommended as it offers an opportunity to receive feedback on your work, claim priority for a discovery, and help research move faster. In Review is one of the most innovative preprint services available, offering real time updates on your manuscript’s progress through peer review.
As costs are involved in every stage of the publication process, authors are asked to pay an open access fee in order for their article to be published open access under a creative commons license. Springer Nature offers a free open access support service to make it easier for our authors to discover and apply for funding to cover article processing charges (APCs) and/or book processing charges (BPCs).
Open peer review refers to the process of making peer reviewer reports openly available. Many publishers and journals offer some form of open peer review, including BMC who were one of the first publishers to open up peer review in 1999.