9 January 2020
Springer Nature and MPDL Services on behalf of Projekt DEAL have announced that the formal contract for a transformative open access agreement 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 22 August 2019.
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 publish and read, ‘transformative’, component of the agreement, effective immediately, entitles authors to publish immediate 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 1 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.
Horst Hippler, former President of the German Rectors' Conference and head of the Projekt DEAL negotiation team, said, “We are very pleased to take the vision of Projekt DEAL a major step further jointly with Springer Nature. The entity of this transformative open access agreement is ´proof of concept´ for Projekt DEAL as a powerful framework for transition in scholarly publishing: it puts an end to hybrid APC payments by authors in parallel to library subscription payments; it operates with a reasonable PAR fee which allows institutional costs to shift gradually from recent licence spending to publication output over the term of the agreement; it enables greater financial control as pre-payments decrease each year. Most importantly, this agreement lays the groundwork for authors and research institutions to make open access the default in scholarly communication."