“Springer Nature and the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) have agreed an approach that will deliver the first ever transformative agreement (TA) for Nature and Nature-branded journals. Building on the nationwide Projekt DEAL agreement concluded last January for Springer Nature journals, the commercial framework agreed with MPDL will now be offered to German institutions, in time for a January 2021 start.
The transformative agreement, which will run for four years, enables authors affiliated with participating institutions to publish their research articles accepted for publication in Nature and Nature-branded research journals immediately open access at no cost to them. Participating institutions will also gain read access to the complete Nature portfolio, including Nature Review titles and all forthcoming Nature-branded journals.
The parties, who have collaborated since the first iterations of transformative agreements (Springer Compact) on ever more impactful agreements to transition, have agreed this framework in the joint knowledge that TAs are the fastest pathway to transition to open access. With the vast majority of authors taking advantage of the open publication services secured for them with TA, Springer Nature’s existing transformative agreements, with author take up reaching over 90%, play a crucial role in supporting countries in making the research they have funded immediately and openly accessible to all.
The Springer Nature – DEAL agreement signed last January was the world’s largest by volume to date and is expected to enable open publication of around 13,000 German research articles a year. The volume of OA articles achieved with transformative agreements, combined with the fact that OA articles are downloaded on average four times more than non-OA articles and cited 1.6 times more, means even greater reach and impact for German researchers and German-funded research.
The Nature framework is based on a tiered price structure; in line with current subscription expenditure levels and taking into account the vastly different holdings and equally different publishing outputs of each participating institution. The terms provide for:
Open access publishing of all research articles accepted for publication in Nature and Nature research journals by affiliated authors
Comprehensive reading access to all Nature subscription titles, including Nature Review titles
Reading access to all new future Nature titles and OA publishing in new launches
Reallocation of the vast proportion of reading fees into support for open access publishing based on a cost of €9,500 per article….”