Springer Nature’s Nature-Branded Waiver Fund Does Not Cover Nature Communications or Scientific Reports

Springer Nature spans everything from BMC and SpringerOpen titles to the Nature-branded portfolio, and the pricing mechanism is the same shape across all of them even though the figures are very different.

The price is fixed on acceptance, not submission. This is worth sitting with: a paper can sit in review for months, and the APC charged is whatever the journal’s rate is on the day it is accepted, after the annual review Springer Nature runs on its prices — not the rate that was advertised when the author chose the journal.

A representative fully open-access journal — Sustainable Energy Research, on the SpringerOpen/BMC platform — currently states an APC of £1,190 / $1,590 / €1,340, described on its own page as the “current” charge, plus VAT or local taxes where applicable. This is one journal’s figure, not a publisher-wide one; it is quoted here as the kind of concrete number the general pricing FAQ page itself does not give.

Non-card payment carries a separate surcharge of £50, $75 or €55 on most journals, on top of the APC itself.

The Nature waiver fund has a named carve-out. A dedicated fund covers primary research open access costs for corresponding authors at qualifying low- and lower-middle-income institutions publishing in Nature and Nature Research journals, but the paper must first be “accepted in principle”, and the fund “does not apply to Nature Communications or Scientific Reports” — two of the portfolio’s highest-volume open-access titles. Separately, financial-need waivers exist for fully open-access journals generally, and some society- or partner-sponsored journals carry no APC at all because they are fully sponsored.

Fixing the price at acceptance rather than at submission puts the funding risk on the author rather than the publisher: if the annual price review lands between submission and acceptance, the author pays the new figure, not the one that was current when they decided to submit. For a review process that can run many months, that is a real planning risk and not a technicality.

The Nature Communications and Scientific Reports exclusion makes sense once the fund’s purpose is read literally: it is described as supporting primary research in Nature and Nature Research journals specifically, and those two titles sit at a different scale and selectivity from the flagship journals the fund is aimed at. It is still worth knowing before you count on it, because both titles are common destinations for exactly the kind of author the fund otherwise seems designed to help.

The administrative surcharge for non-card payment is a small, practical nudge toward the cheapest payment rail for the publisher, and it is easy to miss when an institution pays by invoice or purchase order by default.

How it reaches a specific journal. Institutional and funder open-access agreements with Springer Nature can cover costs directly for affiliated researchers, and eligibility is checked on Springer Nature’s membership page rather than assumed from the journal itself.

For a journal that is society- or partner-sponsored, the APC may not exist at all because the sponsor has covered it — which is a different route to a zero charge from either of the waiver schemes described above, and worth asking about directly if your target journal has an external society behind it.