Project DEAL — Germany is leading the way in the transition to open access publishing - Mills - - Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics - Wiley Online Library

"Pioneers in the open access movement are gratified, and more than a little relieved, to see the world moving in our direction. Over the past several years, several consortiums of national research institutions and libraries, notably Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, Hungary, and Germany, have initiated negotiations with the leading electronic journal publishing houses including Wiley, Springer, and Elsevier. This editorial focuses on one of the more successful initiatives, Project DEAL (Projekt DEAL), in Germany. The goal of this endeavor is to rewrite the nationwide agreements for licensing content in electronic journals. Under the terms of these negotiations, scientists in Germany would get immediate and full online access to most of the electronic content of a publisher’s journals. In exchange, the publication costs for the German authors would be subsidized, and all of their articles would be published immediately open access. This “publish and read” model makes all articles available to anyone with web access, and additionally, authors have access to all electronic journals of the publisher, including archives...."