German research organisation Max Planck Society (MPS) has announced an agreement with the Public Library of Science (PLoS) for the central funding of publication fees of MPS scientists. The move is projected to reflect MPS' commitment to ensure public availability of its research output while taking the burden of open access (OA) publication off the budget of single Max Planck institutes. Like many OA journals, PLoS journals charge a fee for publication. For papers accepted in PLoS journals after July 1, 2008, MPS will pay the publication fee directly to PLoS from central funds for all articles where the corresponding author is affiliated with a Max Planck Institute.
The research institutes of the MPS perform basic research in the interest of the general public in the natural sciences, life sciences, social sciences and the humanities. As co-initiator of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003), MPS claims to have actively supported change in scientific publishing in accordance with OA principles. It is advocating the position that research funding should include allocations for making research results freely available.
PLoS is a nonprofit organisation of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. It applies the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) to all published articles. Under the CCAL, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in PLoS journals, so long as the original authors and source are cited.
