ABOVE: Max Planck Institute for Biophysics
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The Max Planck Society, an enormous German research organization 14,000 scientists strong and comprising multiple research institutes, has ended its subscription to Elsevier journals, the organization announced in a statement this Tuesday (December 18). It did so in support of the German open-access initiative called Project DEAL, after unsuccessful attempts to negotiate an open-access agreement with the publisher. The organization’s digital library will no longer have access to Elsevier’s approximately 2,500 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, once the subscription expires on December 31.
“The system of scholarly publishing today is a relic of the print era, and we want to activate a real paradigm shift in order to finally utilise the opportunities of the digital age,” says Gerard Meijer, director of the Max Planck Society’s (MPS) Fritz Haber Institute and a member of the DEAL negotiating team, in the statement.
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