How to Read Springer Articles for Free, Legally

Springer Link hosts thousands of journals and a very large catalogue of academic books, and most of it sits behind a paywall. The publisher, Springer Nature, also owns Nature and its sister titles, which have their own rules; see our separate guide to reading Nature articles for free. This guide covers the Springer journals and books. Here are the legal ways to read them without a subscription.

1. Check for a free copy in a repository

For Springer's subscription and hybrid journals, authors are allowed to place the accepted manuscript in their university's repository or a funder's archive, for public release typically 12 months after publication. The accepted manuscript has the same peer-reviewed text as the published article, without the journal's typesetting. Authors can also post it on their own personal website straight after acceptance, with no waiting period.

So a Springer paper more than a year old very often has a free copy somewhere, and a newer one may have a copy on the author's own site. Paste the link.springer.com address, the DOI or the title into the finder on our home page and it will check the open-access indexes for you.

2. Look for a preprint

Springer journals allow authors to post the submitted version of a paper on a preprint server, and in mathematics, physics, computer science and increasingly in biology they routinely do, on arXiv or bioRxiv. A preprint is available from the day it is posted, so this route works even for papers published last week. Our guide to preprints and published papers explains what may differ between the two.

3. Check whether the journal is open access

A good share of Springer Nature's output is fully open access, which means every article is free to read and download:

• The BMC journals, such as BMC Medicine and BMC Bioinformatics
• The SpringerOpen journals
• Hybrid journals where the authors' funder has paid to make a particular paper open access

Open-access papers on Springer Link show an "Open access" label on the article page, and the finder will send you straight to the publisher's own PDF when a paper is one of them. Our guide to the kinds of open access explains the difference between a journal being open and a single paper being open.

4. Ask for a SharedIt link

Springer Nature runs a scheme called SharedIt. Authors and subscribers can create a link that lets anyone read the full article in the browser, free of charge. The link does not allow downloading or printing, but it is free and legitimate, and it is available from the day of publication. Authors often post these links on social media or on their lab's website, and you can simply ask the author for one. Our guide has a template for writing to an author.

5. Book chapters

Springer Link is unusual among publishers in how much of its catalogue is books, and a search often lands on a chapter rather than a journal article. Chapters are paywalled in the same way, but a few things help:

• Many Springer books are fully open access, and a growing number of textbooks are too. The chapter page will say so.
• The front matter, the table of contents and the reference list of a paywalled chapter are usually free, which is enough to find out whether the chapter is worth chasing.
• Authors of chapters are generally allowed to share their accepted manuscript, although the rules for books are separate from those for journals and tend to be more restrictive. Asking the author is the quickest way to find out.

The finder works on chapter DOIs as well as article DOIs, so it is worth a try.

6. Use a library

University libraries hold large Springer packages, and many have agreements under which Springer books are available in full. Go through your library's website or choose the institutional login on the article page. If you are not at a university, public libraries can often obtain a single article or chapter for you by inter-library loan; see our guide to getting papers through a library.

If nothing turns up

For a paper less than a year old with no preprint, the embargo on the repository copy is probably still running. Our guide to journal embargo periods explains the timing. Asking the author for a copy or a SharedIt link is the fastest route in the meantime, and the overview of legal ways to read papers for free covers everything else.