TL;DR: Switzerland went without a national Springer Nature contract for the first months of 2026 after swissuniversities and Springer Nature failed to conclude successor terms by the end of 2025. On 10 June 2026 the two sides signed a comprehensive Read & Publish agreement covering 2026-2029, which integrates Springer Nature’s full Gold open-access portfolio and restores full reading access across Springer and Nature journals for Swiss higher-education institutions.
Who swissuniversities is
swissuniversities is the umbrella organisation of Switzerland’s higher-education landscape, representing the cantonal universities, the two federal institutes of technology (ETH Zurich and EPFL), the universities of applied sciences, and the universities of teacher education. It negotiates national Read & Publish and open-access agreements centrally on behalf of its member institutions and other mandating organisations, as part of Switzerland’s National Open Access Strategy. That centralised negotiating model is the same pattern used by Germany’s Projekt DEAL, France’s Couperin, Finland’s FinELib, and the Netherlands’ UKB — a small number of national consortia now do the heavy lifting of transformative-agreement negotiation that individual libraries used to handle alone.
The agreement that expired: 2023-2025
The predecessor contract, running from 1 January 2023, bundled the Springer Compact and Nature-branded journal portfolios and phased in a growing open-access publishing quota for corresponding authors at participating Swiss institutions — roughly 50% of eligible articles covered in 2023, rising to 55% in 2024 and 60% in 2025, alongside full reading access to the licensed portfolio. Negotiations for a successor agreement covering 2026 onward began well before that contract’s expiry, but by December 2025 swissuniversities and Springer Nature had not converged on terms swissuniversities considered consistent with its negotiating mandate.
The no-deal period: January-June 2026
On 18 December 2025 swissuniversities published guidance for its member institutions preparing for the possibility that no successor contract would be in place by 1 January 2026 — and that is what happened. Both swissuniversities and individual institutional libraries (EPFL among them) subsequently described the opening months of 2026 as a genuine contract gap: no active national Read & Publish agreement with Springer Nature was in force, and negotiations continued through the following months before a deal was reached.
CASRAI has not independently verified the granular, institution-level detail of what changed for authors and readers during that gap (for example, exactly how continued access to previously licensed backfile content, or individual open-access publishing arrangements, were handled at each institution) — swissuniversities’ own December 2025 information and FAQ document for member institutions is the authoritative source for that detail. In comparable national no-deal episodes elsewhere (Projekt DEAL’s 2017-2019 gap with Elsevier being the best-known precedent), the general pattern is that consortium-wide reading and publishing terms lapse while institutions manage continuity individually — but readers should treat that as general context, not a confirmed description of the Swiss case specifically.
Resolution: the 2026-2029 agreement
On 10 June 2026, swissuniversities and Springer Nature concluded a new Read & Publish agreement running 2026-2029, formally announced by participating institutions (including EPFL, UZH, UNIGE, and SUPSI) later that month. Reported terms include:
- Full reading access restored across Springer’s and Nature’s complete journal portfolios for all members of participating Swiss institutions.
- Gold open-access integration — unlike the 2023-2025 contract’s capped quota, the new deal folds Springer Nature’s Gold OA portfolio into the agreement, extending open-access publishing eligibility across a substantially larger share of the portfolio (reported at 2,700+ journals) for corresponding authors at participating institutions, with quotas that vary by article type (limited for Gold OA titles, unlimited for Springer hybrid titles).
- An explicit AI-use clause — the contract reportedly sets out terms for the use of artificial intelligence in connection with licensed content, permitting AI-assisted analysis/research and teaching use while prohibiting use of the licensed content to train AI models.
This mirrors a broader trend CASRAI has tracked in national publisher negotiations: consortia increasingly treat AI-training rights over licensed corpora as a distinct negotiating line item, not an afterthought folded into standard reading/reuse terms.
What it means for Swiss-affiliated researchers and administrators
For research offices and library administrators at Swiss institutions, the practical takeaways are:
- Corresponding authors at participating institutions can again publish open access in eligible Springer Nature journals under the national agreement, without the smaller fixed quota structure of the 2023-2025 contract — but eligibility and workflow still run through each institution’s library/OA office, not automatically.
- Any manuscripts submitted or accepted during the January-June 2026 gap may have followed different (institution-specific or individual-APC) arrangements; authors with papers in that pipeline should check with their library whether retroactive OA terms apply, rather than assuming the new national terms cover them automatically.
- The agreement is a useful reference point for any institution currently in its own no-deal standoff with a major publisher: it shows that a contract gap of several months does not necessarily signal a permanent breakdown, and that Gold OA integration and AI-training exclusions are increasingly standard asks in this generation of national negotiations.
Frequently asked questions
Was there really no Springer Nature agreement in Switzerland for part of 2026?
Yes. swissuniversities confirmed negotiations for a successor to the 2023-2025 contract had not concluded by the end of December 2025, and published no-deal preparation guidance for member institutions in advance of a contract-less start to 2026. Multiple Swiss institutional library communications describe an actual contract gap at the start of the year before terms were finalised on 10 June 2026.
What does the new 2026-2029 agreement cover?
Full reading access to Springer’s and Nature’s journal portfolios, and open-access publishing rights integrating Springer Nature’s Gold OA portfolio (not just the hybrid/Compact model used previously), for corresponding authors at participating Swiss higher-education institutions and other mandating organisations.
How does this compare to other national open-access consortia?
swissuniversities’ centralised model is structurally similar to Germany’s Projekt DEAL, France’s Couperin, Finland’s FinELib, the Netherlands’ UKB, and India’s One Nation One Subscription scheme — all replace institution-by-institution licensing with a single national negotiating body. See CASRAI’s Read & Publish agreements guide for how these deals work mechanically for individual authors.
Sources
swissuniversities, Springer Nature negotiation page (accessed July 2026); swissuniversities, Information and FAQ for the preparation of a no-deal Springer Nature 2026 (18 December 2025); EPFL, Read & Publish agreement with Springer Nature 2026-2029. This page reflects information available as of July 2026; consult swissuniversities.ch directly for the current, authoritative contract status.
