The Alliance licence for the SPIE Digital Library, which the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) negotiated with SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, came into force on 1 January 2015. The SPIE Digital Library contains 420,000 scientific contributions from conference proceedings, periodicals and electronic books covering areas such as optics, photonics, biomedicine and microelectronics. Some 18,000 articles are added to the collection each year.
Special conditions and extra services for consortium partners was the outcome of intense negotiations between TIB and SPIE: a discount of up to 30 per cent off the SPIE list price will be granted, the annual price cap will be limited to a maximum of three percent, and authors from participating institutions will be able to post their articles in a repository of their own choice without an embargo period. In addition, SPIE will refund article processing charges (APCs) if the author opted for the 'Golden Road' (Open Access) for the publication in question.
Within the 'Alliance Licences' programme of the German Research Foundation (DFG), TIB had submitted an application for funding of the SPIE Alliance licence, which was approved. Consequently, DFG assumes 25 per cent of the licence fees incurred by each participating institution. TIB managed to recruit 21 consortium partners for the 2015 Alliance licence – namely 14 higher education institutions and seven research institutions. The opt-in model enables new participants to join the licence for the licensing years 2016 and 2017.
