More than 700 German research institutions strike open-access deal with Springer Nature | Science | AAAS

"A consortium of more than 700 German research institutions and libraries today announced an agreement with publisher Springer Nature to make it simpler for authors to publish their papers open access. The agreement is the largest national open-access deal to date, but it doesn’t allow authors to publish open access in Nature or its sister journals.

The consortium, called Project DEAL, has negotiated for more than 3 years with major publishers to reach “publish and read” agreements. Such agreements give member institutions full access to a publisher’s online content and make papers that their researchers publish freely available worldwide. Charges are based not on subscriptions, but on a fee per published paper.

Project DEAL reached a similar agreement with the publisher Wiley in February, but this agreement is bigger. It is expected to cover more than 13,000 articles per year published by researchers working at German institutions, compared with roughly 9500 in Wiley journals. That makes it “the largest ever transformative agreement” for open access, Springer Nature CEO Daniel Ropers told a press conference here this morning...."