This year’s “International Open Access Week” (IOAW), which took place from 19 October to 25 October 2020, was centred around the motto “Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion”, which emphasised the political and social implications of Open Science and focused on the philosophy behind the term “Openness” as a set of values.
Den Beitrag weiterlesen The International Open Access Week 2020 at Chemnitz University of Technology – a summary
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.
The boost for Open Access publishing through the DEAL contracts is now entering its second phase. After Wiley, another major academic publisher, Springer Nature, has negotiated a comprehensive agreement with the DEAL project. The contract is a so-called publish and read agreement. It consists of two components: In addition to the possibility of publishing in around 2,500 Springer Nature journals in Open Access (“Publish”), it also includes access to almost all of the publisher’s journal content (with exception of all “Nature” branded journals) that is still in Closed Access and therefore only available by subscription (“Read”). As in the case of Wiley, Chemnitz University of Technology (TU Chemnitz) is also participating in this new DEAL contract.
Due to the publishing component, it is possible for researchers at TU Chemnitz to publish their articles in Springer Nature journals in Open Access with very little administrative effort. The costs incurred are automatically covered by the budget of the University Library, for which you do not have to submit applications or forward invoices to the library. As a researcher, you therefore benefit from the many advantages of Open Access publishing and are additionally relieved of the bureaucratic hurdles associated sometimes with Open Access publishing, so that you can focus fully on your research.
Below we would like to briefly outline the most important cornerstones of the publishing component of the agreement and explain the practical significance of these for you as an author.