Project DEAL – What is it?
The DEAL project was initiated by the Alliance of German Science Organisations. The aim of the operation is to negotiate Germany-wide licence agreements for online journals of the three largest scientific publishers: Wiley, Springer Nature and Elsevier.
Beyond the aim of gaining access to all the contents of the publishers’ own journals, the main focus is on systematically converting the future publication output of all participating research institutions to open access. In order to achieve this, one of the project group’s main negotiating points is that scientists and scholars from all participating institutions should in principle be able to publish their research articles in open access.
The negotiations with the publishers Wiley (since 2019) and Springer Nature (since 2020) have already successfully led to agreements. TU Chemnitz participates in both of these DEAL agreements, so that the university’s researchers are not only granted access to the contents of thousands of journals published by Springer Nature and Wiley, but are also entitled to publish their research articles in the journals of both publishers entirely in open access, without any administrative effort of their own or individual costs. Instead, the University Library will handle the funding and clearing of these fees.