Springer Nature and Project DEAL signed Open Access contract

Springer Nature and MPDL Services GmbH, on behalf of Project DEAL, have signed the contract for the world’s largest Open Access agreement to date. Under the agreement, authors at more than 700 eligible German scientific and research institutions will be able to publish their manuscripts in Springer Nature hybrid or genuine open-occess-journals with effect from 1 January 2020. Under the agreement, well over 13,000 Open Access articles are expected to be published annually by German researchers. 

At the same time, participating institutions will receive extensive read access to the journal content of Springer, Palgrave, Adis and Macmillan. However, Nature journals, magazines (e.g. Scientific American, Spektrum der Wissenschaft) and technical journals (e.g. ATZ, MTZ) are not included in the contract. 

For each article published in one of the 1,900 hybrid journals, a “Publish and Read (PAR)” fee of €2,750 is charged, which is billed centrally. It is important to note that the PAR fee is not the same as a standard article processing charge (APC). It also includes costs for reading access to the (almost) complete portfolio of subscription journals of the publisher (see above). The contract also includes discounts on the article processing charges for almost all of the publisher’s genuine open-occess-journals (from 1 August 2020). The processing of these publications will also be centrally regulated in future. 

Text modified from the press release.