(9 Jan 2020) Springer Nature and MPDL Services GmbH on behalf of Projekt DEAL today announce that the formal contract for the world’s largest transformative Open Access (OA) agreement to date has been signed. Dated 1 January 2020, the agreement provides OA publishing services and full reading access to Springer Nature journals to scholars and students from across the German research landscape. It follows the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed between the two parties on 22nd August 2019, and is a giant step forward in the OA transition, enabling greater visibility, impact, efficiency, transparency and sustainability in the dissemination of the fruits of German research, for the benefit of researchers everywhere.
Through the agreement, authors affiliated with the 700+ German academic and research institutions which are part of Projekt DEAL, will be able to publish their accepted manuscripts immediate (gold) OA in both Springer Nature ‘hybrid’ and fully OA journals, with the relative costs managed centrally by their institutions. The agreement is expected to see well over 13,000 articles a year from German researchers published OA, making it the largest of its kind.
The Read and Publish, ‘transformative’, component of the agreement, effective immediately, entitles authors to publish immediately OA in Springer Nature’s collection of 1,900 ‘hybrid’ journals and provides participating institutions with permanent access to Springer, Palgrave, Adis and Macmillan journals in the Springer Nature portfolio. The Publish and Read (PAR) fee will be €2,750 for each article published and will be paid from central subscription funds.
The fully OA publishing element will come into effect from 1st August 2020 to allow new administrative processes to be set in place. It will enable centrally administered OA publishing in Springer Nature’s fully OA portfolio, which includes Scientific Reports and Nature Communications. A 20% discount will also be applied to the article processing charges (APCs) of the SpringerOpen and BMC imprints.
The contract will run from 2020 to 2022 with an option to extend to 2023. The signed agreement will be fully published on the Projekt DEAL website in conjunction with the start of the sign-up process for German institutions, towards the end of January.
The full press release is here.
