Springer Nature and Projekt DEAL strike ‘world’s largest transformative open access agreement’

23 August 2019 Books+Publishing

Springer Nature and German university consortium Projekt DEAL have signed a memorandum of understanding on what the organisations are calling the ‘world’s largest transformative open access agreement’, reports the Bookseller.

Projekt DEAL, whose members include almost 700 university libraries and other academic institutions in Germany, was represented by MPDL Services in the deal. The two-part agreement encompasses a fully open access element and a ‘publish and read’ element, with the final contract running from 2020 to 2022 with an option to extend to 2023.

Member institutions of Projekt DEAL will be able to publish open access articles in both Springer Nature’s fully open access journals and Springer Nature’s collection of 1900 hybrid journals. They will also have permanent reading access to material in Springer, Palgrave, Adis, and Macmillan academic journals published during the contract period back to 1997. It’s expected that the deal will facilitate more than 13,000 open access articles published per year from German researchers.

Head of Projekt DEAL Horst Hippler said: ‘We are very pleased to have come to an agreement that meets both core goals of Projekt DEAL: a fair pricing model and a shift towards open access. The long publishing history of Springer Nature is highly respected in the German research community and through this agreement the publisher has shown to be an innovative and open partner ready to deliver the solutions that are best for science and the scholarly endeavour. The emerging contract will thus significantly contribute to making research accessible in an affordable and sustainable manner.’

Category: International news