Library Communication 2/2020

17 June 2020

DEAL with Springer Nature: TU Ilmenau participates in the world's most comprehensive contract on Open Access transformation

The TU Ilmenau already participated in the Germany-wide DEAL agreement with the publishing house Wiley last year, and the university management also signed a corresponding agreement with Springer Nature on 21 April 2020. Thus again, the goal of linking access to the entire portfolio of electronic journals (e-journals) of a major scientific publisher with the sustainable transformation to Open Access publishing was achieved.

The conclusion of the agreement means for the TU Ilmenau the following:

  • Access is available campus-wide to the current and past volumes of all approx. 1,900 Springer journals (including Springer Medical, Palgrave, Adis and Macmillan Academic) which have been published since 1997.
  • Articles published since 1 January 2020 in which the corresponding/submitting author is a member of an institution participating in the Open Access agreement are freely accessible worldwide. For scientists at the TU Ilmenau, this means that all articles that are submitted as corresponding authors to Springer and published from this date onwards will be made openly accessible. It is important to ensure that the Open Access option is not actively rejected at the time of submission.
  • The publication fees for articles published in pure Gold Open Access journals in Springer Nature from 1 August 2020 onwards are paid centrally with a 20 percent discount by the University Library. Authors are thus completely relieved of invoicing and payment matters.

There are exceptions for some journals (e.g. ATZ, MTZ, Scientific American, Spektrum der Wissenschaft and journals under the imprint Nature).

Dr Blume is the contact person for all questions regarding the contract and its concrete implementation in the University Library (contact: openaccess.ub@tu-ilmenau.de).