The publisher of the Science family of journals will allow some authors to place peer-reviewed versions of their papers into publicly accessible repositories, according to Science's news team.
It adds that the scheme applies to researchers with funding from a group of mostly European research funding organizations, though also others like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The group launched Plan S in 2018 with the aim of requiring publicly funded researchers to make their journal articles freely available upon publication.
The initiative's requirements went into effect this month, as Science previously reported. That spurred a November announcement from Springer Nature that it would be offering authors an open-access option, though Science noted that Springer Nature's fee of €9,500 (US $11,390) is higher than other journals' price tags.
American Association for the Advancement of Science says it will pilot this new program for a year to monitor how it affects its revenue flow.
Science adds that this open-access model is dubbed green open access and that if AAAS had pursued a gold open access approach in which authors pay a fee to make their papers immediately available, the cost likely would have been as high as or higher than Springer Nature's fee and prohibitive for many researchers.