On 8 January 2020 Projekt DEAL entered into an agreement with Springer Nature for open access publishing. The second such agreement negotiated by Projekt DEAL is regarded as the world’s largest transformative Open Access agreement at the time of signing. With more than 13,000 scholarly articles by authors affiliated with German institutions accepted for publication each year in Springer Nature journals, the publisher disseminates a significant portion of Germany‘s research output. The DEAL-Springer Nature agreement enables Open Access publishing of articles in approximately 2,340 Springer Nature journals and offers participating institutions extensive access to the publisher’s journal portfolio.

Key elements of the DEAL- Springer Nature-Agreement:

General information

Contracting parties:

Springer Nature and MPDL Services GmbH on behalf of Projekt DEAL

Agreement text:

The full text of the DEAL-Springer Nature agreement can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.17617/2.3174351.

Agreement period:

2020-2022 with the option to renew for one further year (2023)

Eligible institutions:

All German research institutions that are entitled to participate in the alliance and national licenses funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) including universities, universities of applied sciences, research institutions, and state and regional libraries are generally eligible to participate. Hospitals, with the exception of university hospitals, and private companies of any kind are not eligible to participate.

Start of the institutional sign-up process:

From mid-February 2020

Reading / Access

Journals and imprints included in the Agreement:

The agreement grants participating institutions with permanent access to all issues and volumes of the approximately 1,900 Springer Nature journals (including Springer Medical, Palgrave, Adis and Macmillan Academic imprints) published during the contract period.

Title list:

The complete and continuously updated list of Springer Nature journals covered in the agreement, can be found here: https://keeper.mpdl.mpg.de/f/a6dc1e1ed4fc4becb194/?dl=1

Journal titles added to the Springer Nature portfolio in the course of the agreement will be automatically included.

Journals and imprints excluded from the Agreement:

Nature-branded journals and magazines (e.g. Scientific American, Spektrum der Wissenschaft) and technical journals (e.g. ATZ, MTZ) are not included.

Backfiles, Archive:

Participating institutions are granted free access to all back issues of the full journal portfolio, dating from 1997 or as far back as the rights of Springer Nature allow, during the contract period. A DFG-funded purchase of the Springer Nature journal archive will be made to integrate the pre-existing DFG national license of archival rights to Springer journals from 2003-2019 and to close the gap for meanwhile newly added titles.

Deep Discount Pricing (DDP) for print:

For all participating institutions, a discount of 75% on the list price is granted for print purchases (“Deep Discount Price”). Shipping costs are not included.

Open Access Publishing

Open access publishing in ‚hybrid‘ subscription journals:

Open access publishing is available in some 1,900 ‚hybrid‘ subscription journals for articles by eligible authors with an online publication date beginning 1 January 2020. Articles in the approximately 70 Springer Nature specialist medical journals (see title list, “Facharztzeitschriften”) are only eligible for open access publication under the terms of the DEAL Agreement if they are „Research Articles“ (see above definition) and have not been commissioned.

Publishing in fully open access (‚Gold‘) journals:

Publication of articles by eligible authors in Springer Nature Open Access journals, currently numbering 440 titles including Scientific Reports and Nature Communications, will be covered by the agreement beginning August 1, 2020, and the relative open access publishing fees will be managed centrally by participating institutions. A discount of 20% will be granted on the list Article Processing Charges (APC) of all Springer Open and BMC titles, with the exception of Scientific Reports and Nature Communications. Under the terms of the agreement, price increases on list APCs of all fully open access (‚Gold‘) journals may not exceed 3.5% per year.

CC license type:

CC-BY is he default license type for open access publications under the agreement with some few journals offering only CC-BY-NC (see title list).

Eligible authors:

Submitting corresponding authors affiliated with eligible institutions with the status “corresponding author” may publish their works open access under the terms of the agreement. Submitting corresponding authors are those who submit the manuscript to the publisher and are responsible for the correspondence related to its publication.

Article types covered:

Open access publication in Springer Nature ‚hybrid‘ subscription journals (“Open Choice”) is covered for:

Research Articles = Original Papers, Review Papers, Brief Communications

Non-Research Articles = Editorial Notes, Book Reviews, Letters, Reports

Non-Research Articles in medical journals [see annotations in title list] are excluded.

Open access publication in Springer Nature fully open access (‚Gold‘) journals is covered for: Research Articles = Original Papers, Review Papers, Brief Communications.

Publish & Read Fee (PAR Fee):

2.750 € per published Research Article

917 € per Non-Research Article

[Note: different from an Article Processing Charge (APC), the PAR fee, paid centrally by participating institutions for each article to appear under the DEAL agreement, covers the cost of the open access publishing services rendered and, to a lesser degree, reading access in Springer Nature subscription journals. The PAR fee for non-research articles is part of the overall structure of the agreement, which will be accessible with the publication of the contract at the end of January 2020.]

Further information can be found in the FAQ for participating institutions and the FAQ for authors.

Last update: February 18, 2020.