Springer Nature has announced the intention for a new 5 year Transformative Agreement (TA) with the German DEAL Consortium. This will build upon its successful landmark 2020 agreement, which has delivered a more than threefold increase in open access (OA) article output with around 15,800 OA articles published in 2022, including almost 15,000 under DEAL. This continued cooperation is reflective of both parties' commitment to the principles of open science and ensuring the global reach, impact, and use of German research.
The Berlin-headquartered global academic publisher and the DEAL Consortium, open to over 1,000 German and academic research institutions, are currently finalizing a new iteration of the 2020 agreement, which has: Significantly accelerated the transition toward freely available research, leading to around 15,800 OA articles from Germany (including almost 15,000 under DEAL) in 2022 compared to less than 4,700 in 2018; Increased the visibility of German research worldwide with downloads of Springer Nature content created by researchers in Germany, increasing from 8.7 million in 2020 to over 48.6 million in 2022; and Secured equal access to global subscription content for German Institutions, usage of which grew by 53% between 2018 and 2022.
The agreement will continue to allow German researchers from participating institutions to publish OA in Springer Nature’s hybrid Springer, Palgrave, Adis journals as well as in its fully OA portfolio including the fully OA Nature titles. As part of the agreement, researchers at these institutions retain access to subscription articles across the Springer, Palgrave, and Adis portfolios. A separate framework agreement for OA publishing in the Nature research journals is in place with Max Planck Digital Library.
It is anticipated that the final agreement will be signed in the coming weeks.
The publisher has been a global pioneer in making research freely available and aims to have 50 percent of its primary research published via OA by the end of next year.
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