Economists have a cliché: There’s no such thing as a free lunch. And I do believe that, if someone’s providing services—publishing services like managing peer review, permanent hosting, and search engine optimization for example, it’s going to have a cost.

[T]hese generous organizations make it possible for us to publish quality research, fully open access, without authors having to pay from their research grants.

But—what there is—are lunches where someone else has generously and kindly covered the costs. Bringing this back to SpringerOpen, what this means is that a significant number of our open access journals are sponsored by institutions and philanthropies. This means that those third parties have covered all of the publishing costs, and that means that you can publish in these journals, with all of the benefits of open access, without paying any article-processing charges.

These groups are generous for a mix of reasons. Some to promote the benefits of open access and help encourage the shift to open access for publishing overall. Some to help gain more international recognition for the research their members are doing. Some to bring more attention to their discipline and national research communities as a whole. Whatever the reasons, these generous organizations make it possible for us to publish quality research, fully open access, without authors having to pay from their research grants.

Below I’ve listed some of our sponsored journals, along with their sponsoring organizations. If any are publishing in your discipline, I’d encourage you to check them out.