TL;DR: CAPES, Brazil’s federal agency for graduate-education accreditation and scholarships, and Springer Nature have signed a three-year transformative agreement running January 1, 2026 through December 31, 2028. Corresponding authors at more than 400 CAPES-affiliated institutions can publish open access with article processing charges (APCs) covered in more than 1,730 eligible hybrid journals under the Springer and Academic Journals imprints, while all users at those institutions get reading access to more than 1,770 titles on the Springer Nature Link and Nature.com platforms. It is one of several transformative agreements CAPES has signed with major publishers as it scales up Brazil’s shift toward open access.
What CAPES and Springer Nature agreed to
The agreement, announced by Springer Nature on December 5, 2025, is a transformative agreement in the same family as the Read & Publish deals national consortia elsewhere have negotiated with major publishers (see CASRAI’s guide to how Read & Publish agreements work for authors). It bundles two rights into a single contract: unlimited reading access to Springer Nature’s journal portfolio, and fee-free open-access publishing for eligible corresponding authors, replacing the separate per-article APC payments and per-title subscription negotiations those two functions previously required.
Per Springer Nature’s published agreement terms, coverage runs from articles accepted on or after January 1, 2026 through articles accepted by December 31, 2028 — a three-year term. Reading access covers more than 1,770 journals across the Springer Nature Link and Nature.com platforms. Publishing coverage is narrower: APCs are waived for corresponding authors publishing Original Papers, Review Papers, Brief Communications, and Continuing Education articles in more than 1,730 eligible hybrid journals under the Springer and Academic Journals imprints. Nature-branded and fully open-access journals are handled under separate terms and are not automatically included in the hybrid-journal APC waiver.
Who is eligible
Eligibility runs through CAPES’s existing infrastructure for managing publisher agreements rather than through Springer Nature directly:
- Institutional affiliation. The corresponding author must be affiliated with one of the more than 400 institutions enrolled in CAPES’s Program for Supporting the Dissemination of Scientific and Technological Information (PADICT), the mechanism CAPES uses to administer its portfolio of publisher agreements.
- ORCID linkage. The corresponding author needs a unique ORCID iD linked to their record in Meus Dados CAPES, CAPES’s researcher-data platform — the identifier is what the agreement’s eligibility check runs against, so an unlinked or duplicate ORCID record will block a submission from qualifying.
- Compliance with CAPES Ordinance No. 120/2024. Authors must meet the conditions set out in this ordinance, which governs how CAPES-funded and CAPES-affiliated researchers engage with publisher open-access agreements.
- Licensing. Accepted articles are published under a Creative Commons CC BY license, the standard maximally-permissive open license most transformative agreements require as a condition of the APC waiver.
Springer Nature’s own estimate, cited in its announcement, is an average of roughly 6,000 articles per year published open access under the agreement across the three-year term.
How this fits CAPES’s broader transformative-agreement strategy
CAPES has been expanding its transformative-agreement portfolio with major international publishers since 2024, with institutional library announcements reporting agreements covering, in addition to Springer Nature, publishers including Wiley, Elsevier, IEEE, the American Chemical Society, and Royal Society Publishing. Readers should treat the exact scope and terms of any individual CAPES-publisher agreement other than this one as reported rather than independently verified here, and should check the relevant publisher’s own agreement page for current terms.
The strategy mirrors what national and regional consortia elsewhere have done to consolidate open-access spend into centrally negotiated deals rather than leaving individual institutions or researchers to negotiate APCs one article at a time — the same logic behind consortia CASRAI has covered such as Finland’s FinELib, the Netherlands’ UKB, Norway’s Sikt, and Japan’s JUSTICE, and the negotiation principles tracked by the ESAC Initiative’s transformative-agreement registry. CAPES’s approach differs in one respect worth flagging for research-administration audiences: eligibility is anchored to a national researcher-identity system (Meus Dados CAPES and its ORCID linkage) and a national accreditation ordinance rather than to institutional library-consortium membership alone, which ties OA publishing rights more directly to CAPES’s existing graduate-program accreditation and researcher-registry infrastructure. CASRAI’s guide to CAPES’s graduate accreditation, Qualis, and scholarship functions and the Lattes Platform, Brazil’s national researcher CV and identifier system cover the surrounding infrastructure this agreement builds on.
Why it matters for research administrators
For research offices and library staff at eligible Brazilian institutions, the practical effect is that corresponding authors no longer need separate APC funding or a per-article waiver request to publish open access in the covered Springer/Academic Journals hybrid titles — eligibility is checked automatically against institutional affiliation and ORCID/Meus Dados CAPES linkage at submission. That shifts the administrative burden from individual grant or departmental APC budgeting toward making sure researcher ORCID records are correctly linked and current, and toward tracking which of the more than 1,730 eligible titles a given submission falls under before assuming APC coverage applies. For institutions and consortia elsewhere evaluating similar national-scale transformative agreements, CAPES’s model is a live example of tying OA publishing eligibility to an existing national researcher-identity and accreditation system rather than building separate consortium-membership infrastructure from scratch.
Frequently asked questions
When does the CAPES-Springer Nature agreement take effect?
Coverage applies to articles accepted between January 1, 2026 and December 31, 2028, a three-year term.
Does the agreement cover all Springer Nature journals?
No. Reading access covers more than 1,770 journals on the Springer Nature Link and Nature.com platforms, but the APC waiver for open-access publishing applies specifically to more than 1,730 eligible hybrid journals under the Springer and Academic Journals imprints, for Original Papers, Review Papers, Brief Communications, and Continuing Education article types. Nature-branded titles are handled separately.
Who qualifies for the APC waiver?
The corresponding author must be affiliated with one of the more than 400 CAPES-affiliated institutions enrolled in PADICT, hold an ORCID iD linked to Meus Dados CAPES, and meet the conditions of CAPES Ordinance No. 120/2024. Accepted articles publish under a CC BY license.
Is this CAPES’s only transformative agreement?
No. CAPES has been building out a portfolio of transformative agreements with major publishers since 2024; institutional library sources report agreements also covering Wiley, Elsevier, IEEE, the American Chemical Society, and Royal Society Publishing, though readers should verify current terms directly with each publisher.
Sources: Springer Nature Group press release, “Springer Nature and CAPES Break Barriers in Brazil with Unlimited Transformative Agreement” (December 5, 2025); Springer Nature’s CAPES Brazil open-access agreement page (springernature.com/gp/open-science/oa-agreements/brazil/capes).
