CCC's Roy Kaufman: New Year, New DEAL, and Pressure Points Ahead

At that time, the final contract was expected by the end of the year, and the arrangement was to be open to all member-institutions of Projekt DEAL, which comprises more than 700 publicly and privately funded academic and research organizations in Germany. On Thursday (January 9), media messaging from Springer Nature's director of communications, Susie Winter, indeed informed us that "Springer Nature and MPDL Services GmbH on behalf of Projekt DEAL today announce that the formal contract for the world's largest transformative open access (OA) agreement to date has been signed. Dated January 1, the agreement provides OA publishing services and full reading access to Springer Nature journals to scholars and students from across the German research landscape. "It follows the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed between the two parties on August 22, and is a giant step forward in the OA transition, enabling greater visibility, impact, efficiency, transparency, and sustainability in the dissemination of the fruits of German research, for the benefit of researchers everywhere." A full text of the agreement is to be released by the end of this month, and the deal is to be in force through 2022, with an option to renew for one more year, through 2023. The trend represented by the Projekt DEAL library consortium in Germany, Kaufman says, is unmistakable. "Major STM publishers are inking wide-ranging deals with customers on a national or even broader scale," he says. "In April, Elsevier inked an innovative'read and publish' agreement"--referred to as a RAP deal--"with the Norwegian academic community.