ABOVE: Humboldt University is one of the institutions represented by Project DEAL.
© ISTOCK.COM, MIODRAG MILUTINOVIC
A consortium of more than 700 research institutions and libraries in Germany has reached an open-access agreement with the publisher Springer Nature, it announced yesterday (August 22), as Science reports. According to the contract, researchers at members of the consortium, called Project DEAL, will be able to publish their articles open-access, meaning that the papers will be free for anyone to read, in exchange for a per-article fee paid by the author. Member institutions will also have full access to the journals’ online content, rather than having to pay subscription fees. The deal excludes Nature and other Nature brand journals, however.
The agreement and others like it function to shift the costs of scientific publishing away from journal readers and toward paper authors and their institutions. Because the cost is per article published, rather than ...
