Partnership with Max Planck Society is Springer Nature's most comprehensive open access book agreement
11.05.2022 12:30
The new agreement between Springer Nature and the Max Planck Society (MPG), represented by the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL), expands the publishing program to include open access books. The Open Access (OA) agreement covers all Springer Nature book brands across a wide range of disciplines and offers authors at over 80 Max Planck Institutes funding support for the publication of open access books.
This is the fifth OA book agreement for Springer Nature[1] and the second[2] and largest national OA partnership on books to date[3]. This is another crucial step on the path to sustainable open access developments. Scientific studies show that OA book publications are downloaded ten times more often and cited more than twice as often[4], which makes MPG authors even more visible.
Niels Peter Thomas, President Greater China & Managing Director Books, Springer Nature, said about the partnership: “Open research, which includes books, research data and journal articles, is important for advancing scientific knowledge. Sustainable open access developments for books are not as fast as for magazines. We are therefore even more pleased to be expanding our long-standing partnership with the MPG to give authors the opportunity to publish their books open access. Open access developments in books are very complex, so it is important to promote awareness of sustainable paths to OA and thus strengthen our common goal of open research. This new partnership is a critical milestone in supporting open access books, and we look forward to working with additional partners to further expand this commitment.”
The three-year agreement comes into force retroactively from January 1, 2022 and enables authors from all 86 Max Planck Institutes to receive a discount on the Book Publishing Charge (BPC) in order to publish their book open access. The MPDL will make a central contribution to covering the reduced BPC, so that costs for authors will continue to fall. The discount and financial support for all book publications will be available under a CC BY license, which will make all publications from research, technology, medicine, humanities and social sciences easy to find and freely accessible. Readers worldwide can freely access the book content via the SpringerLink platform.
Ralf Schimmer, Head of Information at MDPL, about the agreement: “With this new agreement with Springer Nature, we are further advancing one of our core tasks – supporting our authors in disseminating their research results beyond the restrictions of paywalls. By covering a significant portion of the costs of publishing open access books, we enable more authors to publish their work freely accessible. This means our authors reach an even larger readership and the impact of the research is increased, especially in the disciplines where books play a crucial role in the scientific communication process.”
Springer Nature says it is taking a “leading position in promoting open access publishing of books”. Through a variety of partnerships and transformative contracts, Springer Nature supports authors, regardless of discipline, location or funding, in open access publishing to strengthen the open research pathway. According to its own information, Springer Nature is the largest open access book publisher and has been a pioneer for the OA book program since it was launched in 2012 Open Access Book Models. Since then, more than 1,500 open access books have been published, with chapters collectively downloaded over 200 million times.[5]
[1] To date, Springer Nature has five open access book contracts with partners such as LYRASIS, the UNESCO, the University of California, Berkeley as well as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations completed.
[2] The publisher's first institutional open access book agreement was with the University of California, Berkeley Library - Springer Nature and UC Berkeley Library Sign New Open Access Book Partnership | Corporate Affairs Homepage | Springer Nature
[3] By number of institutes covered and expected output
[4] Diversifying Readership Through Open Access | Open research | Springer Nature