Springer Nature and Projekt DEAL sign MoU for OA agreement

August 22^nd 2019, marked a very special day for us at Springer Nature. On this day, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for an OA agreement with Projekt DEAL, a consortium of over 700 publically and privately funded academic institutions and research institutions in Germany, was signed. Looking back over the past twenty years, Springer and Nature both independently and together – have always been at the forefront of OA publishing and developments, as the needs of the research community have evolved.

The first BMC open access article was published on July 19th 2000, a Springer Nature imprint which is now represented by a portfolio of around 600 fully OA journals. In early 2004, at the height of the debate on open access and STM publishing, and in the spirit of experimentation that is part of our culture, Springer Open Choice was launched; a system that would accommodate those that wished to publish open access in a subscription journal. Today, more than 1,900 journals across Springer Nature offer optional open access.

As the world’s largest OA publisher, we continue to lead the way in offering innovative solutions for authors, their institutions and funders to support OA adoption, from our first transformative ‘Read and Publish’ agreement in 2015 to our first fully OA agreement in 2019. We at Springer Nature are all very excited about the signed MoU with DEAL; it is the largest transformative deal that Springer Nature has done to date and will enable scientists in Germany from small and large institutions in physical, natural, applied and social sciences to publish OA with Springer Nature.

As a result of the agreement, more than 13,000 articles by German scholars and scientists are expected to be published open access per year. The agreement is divided into two parts, including a fully OA element and a Publish and Read (PAR) element which enables eligible authors to publish in around 600 fully open access and 1,900 hybrid journals, including the brands Springer, Palgrave, Adis and academic journals on nature.com. Additionally, participating institutions will receive permanent reading access to content in these journals. Journals that are newly added to the portfolio during the contract period as well as backfiles from 1997 are also included in the agreement. The contract starts in 2020 ending in 2022, with an option to extend to 2023.

After signing the MoU with DEAL in August, Dagmar Laging, Vice President Institutional Sales Europe at Springer Nature said: “I am personally very excited about the big step we all made today. It was a very complex process over the last three years to get where we are today. It was impressive to see how we from Springer Nature worked on this as a team together and it was a pleasure for me to work with the DEAL committee who always showed great dedication and strong interest to making this a success for the research community. I believe that this agreement will show great impact in supporting the research community and will support the transformation towards OA in the right direction.”

You can read a full interview with Dagmar Laging on Scholarly Kitchen here.

Useful links:

• MoU with Projekt DEAL

• More about transformative deals and how they substantially aid the transition to OA

• Springer Nature’s open access journal portfolio
• Springer Nature’s existing OA agreements