We encourage our authors to consider the open access arrangements of their accepted papers as this can benefit the whole community and make your results more visible.

Since Springer's copyright requirements allow it (see here), we hope authors will make open access copies of their papers (post-prints) available at a non-commercial repository such as arXiv.org or their own university's open repository, if available.

However, please be aware of several restrictions.

1. The paper must not be the publishers version e.g., with added pagination etc

2. You must provide a link to the publisher’s version including the DOI

3. Don’t user a commercial host such as ResearchGate or Mendeley

In other words, Springer-Verlag offers ROMEO Green Open Access. For details see the Open Access wiki pages and the ROMEO website.

For those wishing more details the specific and relevant parts of your copyright assignment are given below.

• "Author may self-archive an author-created version of his/her Contribution on his/her own website and/or the repository of Author’s department or faculty.”

• "Author may also deposit this version on his/her funder’s or funder’s designated repository at the funder’s request or as a result of a legal obligation.”

• "He/she may not use the Publisher’s PDF version …"

You can:

• "only post his/her own version, provided acknowledgment is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on the Publisher’s website. The link must be provided by inserting the DOI number of the article in the following sentence: “The final authenticated version is available online at https://doi.org/[insert DOI].” The DOI (Digital Object Identifier) can be found at the bottom of the first page of the published paper.”

You may also have:

• "Prior versions of the Contribution published on non-commercial pre-print servers like ArXiv/CoRR and HAL can remain on these servers and/or can be updated with Author’s accepted version."