A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between MPDL Services, on behalf of Projekt DEAL, and Springer Nature, sets the scene for the world’s most comprehensive open access (OA) agreement to be finalised later this year.
Reaching such an understanding has been possible through acknowledgement of the common commitment of both parties to the principle of open science: Projekt DEAL’s vision and enablement of open access to German research on a large-scale and Springer Nature’s position as the largest OA publisher and their expertise as a pioneer of transformative deals. The agreement is expected to see well over 13,000 articles a year from German researchers published OA, meaning they will be freely and universally available for the world’s students, scholars and scientists to read, share, use and reuse from the moment of publication.
The transformative two-part agreement will encompass a fully OA element and a Publish and Read (PAR) element. This will enable eligible authors to publish OA in both Springer Nature’s fully OA journals, the largest OA portfolio in the world with over 600 titles, and Springer Nature’s collection of 1,900 hybrid journals, which collectively already publish one in four of all OA articles. In addition, the model provides the academic community of the participating institutions with permanent reading access to content in Springer, Palgrave, Adis, and Macmillan academic journals published during the term of the contract.
The final contract will run from 2020 to 2022 with an option to extend to 2023. For 2020, the PAR component is based on OA publication of at least 9,500 articles and grants participating institutions with permanent reading access to 1,900 journals in the Springer, Palgrave, Adis and Macmillan portfolios. The costs for reading access and OA publishing in the PAR component will be reflected in a per-article PAR fee of €2,750.
Springer Nature will offer a 20% discount on the list price for OA publishing in BMC and SpringerOpen titles for all institutions; list price increases of article processing charges will not exceed 3.5 % per journal title per year calculated based on the 2020 list price. The PAR element does not include Nature and Nature branded subscription journals or purely professional journals as well as magazines, such as Scientific American or Spektrum der Wissenschaft.
Participating institutions will have complimentary backfile access to issues of included journals during the contract period back to 1997. Springer Nature and Projekt DEAL also aim to close the gaps in access to archive content from all Springer Nature journals covered by the MoU.
Projekt DEAL was set up by the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany representing the vast majority of the most important science and research organisations in Germany. The consortium includes more than 700 mostly publicly funded academic institutions in Germany such as universities, universities of applied sciences, research institutions and state and regional libraries. As part of the project, national licensing agreements are to be implemented for the entire portfolio of electronic journals of large academic publishers.
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