DEAL Consortium and Springer Nature Renew Successful Open Access Agreement for Germany

Following news last month of both parties’ intention to reach an agreement, the German DEAL Consortium and Springer Nature have announced the signing of a new Open Access (OA) agreement that will boost international reach and impact for Germany-based researchers and provide academic institutions in Germany with open access publication options and reading access to world-leading content.

Under the agreement

• researchers from participating institutions will continue be able to publish OA in Springer Nature’s OA and hybrid Springer, Palgrave, and Adis journals as well as in its fully OA Nature titles and BioMedCentral journals,
• participating institutions will continue to benefit from attractive terms when their researchers publish Open Access (OA),
• researchers at participating institutions retain reading access to articles across the Springer, Palgrave and Adis portfolios.

Signed on 24 November by Springer Nature and MPDL Services gGmbH as the DEAL operating Entity, the agreement runs from 2024 through 2028. It does not include the hybrid Nature branded journals. The parties intend to continue discussion on these titles in 2024 following the end of the existing Framework Agreement with MPDL.

The preceding agreement between DEAL and Springer Nature from 2020 has played a significant role in advancing the transition to Open Access in Germany without driving up cost. Since then, the number of published OA articles in Springer Nature journals has increased to more than 50.000. It also significantly improved accessibility of Springer Nature journal content, as article usage within Germany rose by more than 50 percent across the portfolio over the contracted period.

Gerard Meijer, Director of the Max Planck Society’s Fritz Haber Institute who negotiated on behalf of DEAL, said: “This agreement is a success for science. It strengthens the shift in scientific publishing towards open access as a standard and offers a longer-term and sustainable perspective. I am particularly delighted that the agreement takes the aspect of data protection into account in line with the expectations of the scientific community.”

Dagmar Laging, VP Institutional Sales Europe for Springer Nature said: “DEAL has really boosted the visibility of German research in the world, while securing broad access to high-quality journal content. That is why we are very pleased that we have come to an agreement that will bring us even closer to open science in Germany while offering good value to participating institutions.”

Further information
The agreement as well as further information on its terms and conditions and the sign-up process, can be found here:

(ENG) https://deal-konsortium.de/en/agreements/springer-nature
(DE) https://deal-konsortium.de/vertraege/springer-nature

ENDS

About the DEAL Consortium

The DEAL Consortium, instituted by the Alliance of German Science Organizations and led by the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK) aims at concluding nationwide “publish and read” agreements with the three largest commercial publishers of scholarly journals. The objective of DEAL is to secure agreements that ensure the immediate publication of research articles by authors from German institutions as open access articles and that provide perpetual full-text access to the publisher’s entire journal portfolio, while at the same time achieving fair and reasonable pricing for these services through a simple and forward-looking model based on the number of articles published. The DEAL Consortium is open to around 900 mostly publicly funded academic institutions in Germany, including universities, universities of applied sciences, research institutes, and state and regional libraries.

About MPDL Services gGmbH

The DEAL Operating Entity MPDL Services gGmbH (MPDLS) boosts the visibility of the scientific community in Germany by securing open access publishing services and access to scientific literature for researchers. It provides the infrastructure and know-how to enable research institutions across Germany to benefit collectively and equitably from the cost-effectiveness of the nationwide DEAL agreements with scholarly publishers, and it concludes such DEAL agreements for the use and benefit of the scientific community in Germany. Comprising members of the Alliance of Science Organizations, MPDL Services, a non-profit organization (gGmbH), provides a crucial framework for the transition to open access in Germany and supports institutions in redirecting their investments in scholarly publishing towards the open dissemination of research.

About Springer Nature

For over 180 years Springer Nature has been advancing discovery by providing the best possible service to the whole research community. We help researchers uncover new ideas, make sure all the research we publish is significant, robust and stands up to objective scrutiny, that it reaches all relevant audiences in the best possible format, and can be discovered, accessed, used, re-used and shared. We support librarians and institutions with innovations in technology and data; and provide quality publishing support to societies. 

As a research publisher, Springer Nature is home to trusted brands including Springer, Nature Portfolio, BMC, Palgrave Macmillan and Scientific American. For more information, please visit springernature.com