Springer Nature has signed its largest institutional OA book deal with the Max Planck Society through the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL). The agreement covers all Springer Nature book imprints, across a broad range of disciplines, providing OA funding to affiliated authors from over 80 Max Planck Institutes.
Initiated at the request of several Max Planck institutes, the Max Planck Digital Library is supporting the platform „Peer Community in Registered Reports“ by making a one-time funding contribution of 5,000 Euro.
The Peer Community In (PCI) initiative is a non-profit, non-commercial platform that evaluates and recommends preprints in many scientific fields. The overarching aim of this researcher-run organization is to create specific communities of researchers reviewing and recommending, for free, unpublished preprints in their field.
From Google’s English: “Open Access (OA) has nothing to do with publishing suddenly becoming free. There are no volunteers doing slave service. If the publication is to have quality, it has to be edited and proofread, it has to be set and provided with illustrations, etc., just as it used to be. The costs only shift, but have to be paid for. The Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) has an interesting financing model: It assumes that one third of the costs will be paid by the MPDL, one third by the publisher and one third by the author. The publisher can pursue a double strategy by offering the online publications in OA mode, but at the same time producing print copies that are subject to a fee. Such are still wanted by some institutions and private individuals. …
If you, as a non-institutional author, want to publish your contribution OA, either the publisher has to bear all the costs or you share them with the publisher. In this respect, OA is window dressing….”
“The Microbiology Society and the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) are pleased to announce a three-year transformative agreement starting in 2022. The Publish and Read model will enable researchers of 86 Max Planck Institutes in Germany to publish any article accepted for publication in the journals of the Society open access, without having to pay Article Processing Charges (APCs). Through the agreement, MPDL will cover costs of open access publishing of articles in both fully open access and hybrid journals, allowing scientists to retain copyright and secure the broadest possible readership for their work.”
“Rather than framing open access as a movement, I prefer to talk about open access as a logical and necessary evolution in scholarly communication. Living through the COVID-19 pandemic, I think there is no doubt in anyone’s mind of the value in openly sharing scholarly knowledge nor of the urgency with which authoritative knowledge should be shared. The process of science hinges upon sharing, discussing, challenging and reproducing the results of research, and for that process to function optimally, research results need to reach the widest audience possible.
Researchers today heavily rely on journals to provide the scholarly communication services of organized criticism and dissemination of their results, but the subscription business model that underlies the bulk of scholarly journals is actually creating drag on the advancement of science. What I find compelling is to consider what researchers could accomplish if they were able to finally interact with an open corpus of peer-reviewed research, instead of limiting their interactions to those journals their libraries happen to be able to subscribe to this year. ”
“Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) has signed an unlimited “read-and-publish” transformative agreement with Rockefeller University Press (RUP) on behalf of the Max Planck Society. The agreement covers Open Access (OA) publishing of articles in RUP’s three hybrid journals: Journal of Cell Biology (JCB), Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM) and Journal of General Physiology (JGP).
Under the agreement, which runs from January 1, 2021 to December 31, 2022, articles by corresponding authors affiliated with Max Planck Institutes will be published immediate open access under a CC-BY license and directly deposited in PubMed Central (PMC). The transformative agreement repurposes former subscription funds to cover all open access publishing fees for authors, and there is no limit to the number of articles that may be published under the terms of the agreement. Max Planck Institutes also receive unlimited access to RUP’s journals. Learn how authors can take advantage of new agreement….”
“Some open access research advocates, however, are critical of the new agreement and the cost it imposes on researchers. ‘That opportunity is only open to selected organisations so the rest of the world cannot participate,’ says Peter Murray-Rust, a chemist at the University of Cambridge and campaigner in this area. ‘It’s basically saying that the primary point of publishing is to get an accolade,’ he continues. ‘There is a club of rich nations who get to publish in glamour journals like Nature and the publisher–academic complex works to dismiss everyone else.’
Peter Suber, who directs Harvard University library’s office for scholarly communication, is also sceptical. ‘It is a bad deal for universities, it’s not a bad deal for Nature,’ he tells Chemistry World. ‘Paying this “prestige tax” to publish in Nature is a bad idea. Libraries end up paying for Nature’s high rejection rate, not higher discoverability or visibility.’ ”
“The publisher of Nature has agreed its first deal to allow some researchers to publish in the journal, and in 33 other Nature-branded titles, under open-access (OA) terms.
Research published in Nature and its sister journals is behind a paywall, although the journals have sometimes chosen to make articles OA. But in April, publisher Springer Nature announced that it would offer open-accessing publishing routes for its most selective journals that would comply with Plan S, a European-led initiative to open up the scientific literature. (Nature is editorially independent of its publisher.)….
The publisher of Nature has agreed its first deal to allow some researchers to publish in the journal, and in 33 other Nature-branded titles, under open-access (OA) terms.
Research published in Nature and its sister journals is behind a paywall, although the journals have sometimes chosen to make articles OA. But in April, publisher Springer Nature announced that it would offer open-accessing publishing routes for its most selective journals that would comply with Plan S, a European-led initiative to open up the scientific literature. (Nature is editorially independent of its publisher.)…”
“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….”
“Paris, France 18 December 2018. Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A) the international Journal that publishes papers on all aspects of astronomy and astrophysics and one of the leading journals in its field, has signed a two-year transformative Open Access agreement with the Max Planck Society in Germany. Under this agreement, funds previously paid by the Max Planck Digital Library for subscriptions will, instead, be converted into a publishing fund, enabling corresponding authors from the Max Planck Institutes to publish their articles open access in A&A, and at the same time, granting access to the journal’s content to all Max Planck researchers.”
“The conference brought to light strong consensus and alignment among the diverse international communities represented around the necessity of stepping up efforts to move away from the subscription-based system of scholarly publishing to open access-based business models. A major focus was placed on transformative agreements (eg “read and publish”), which were identified as perhaps the most viable instrument at the moment to accelerate the transition to open access. As it became clear from statements made by representatives from Japan, the United States, South Africa and others, that readiness to adopt this approach is now extending beyond Europe, where it originated, and is currently being adopted in several countries; in particular, this was emphasized in a bold statement from China, the nation with the largest share of research publications.
After aligning on the goals and strategies during the first day of the conference, the CEOs of the three largest publishers of scholarly journals, Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, and Springer Nature, were invited by the President of the Max Planck Society, Martin Stratmann, to discuss the global demand for transformative agreements on the second day. The message conveyed to the publishers was that the global research communities are committed to complete and immediate open access, to retaining author copyrights and to negotiating transformative agreements that are temporary, transitional, and cost-neutral as a means to shift to full open access within just a few years with the expectation that cost savings in scholarly communication will follow as market forces take hold. The publishers were called upon to move towards complete and immediate open access according to these principles.
It also came out that there is a strong alignment between the approaches taken by OA2020, Plan S, the Jussieu Call and other approaches dedicated to drive more open access into the system of scholarly communication….”