2nd DEAL Agreement with Springer Nature (2024-2028)

On 24 November 2023, MPDL Services gGmbH signed the second contract with Springer Nature on behalf of the DEAL Consortium. The new five-year contract builds on the success of the previous DEAL contracts and offers favourable conditions for Open Access publishing in Springer Nature journals as well as comprehensive reading access, ensuring a seamless transition for participating institutions to the proven services for their researchers.

Agreement highlights

Open Access Publishing

  • Authors across Germany publish Open Access (OA) articles in more than 2,000 Springer Nature subscription journals.

  • For publications in SpringerOpen and BioMed Central Open Access journals (over 500 titles), a 20% discount is granted and price increases for APCs are contractually capped.

Reading access

  • Participating institutions receive access to almost all journal content on the Springer Nature platform, as specified in the journal title list. Perpetual access applies to content published in the years of participation.

Pricing model

  • The cost of Open Access publishing and reading access for subscription journals will be covered by the reallocation of former subscription fees as part of the DEAL transitional cost model "Publish and Read". A Publish and Read (PAR) Fee of EUR 2,600 per publication in (hybrid) subscription journals has been agreed for the duration of the contract.

  • Price adjustments of the PAR Fee of 1% in 2027 and 2028 apply if the inflation rate in the contract years 2024 to 2026 exceeds 3% in each of these three years.

  • As in the previous contract, non-research articles may continue to be published in Springer Nauture as OA articles, but no individual PAR fee will be charged for them.

Documents & Links

Sign up for Springer Nature 2024

Eligible institutions can join the agreement at any time. Institutions that are already part of the DEAL Consortium have received their participation documents via MPDL Services in the next days. All interested institutions that haven't received their documents yet are welcome to contact MPDL Services gGmbH.

1st DEAL Agreement with Springer Nature (2020-2023)

Projekt DEAL entered its second nationwide transformative agreement with Springer Nature on 8 January 2020.

With more than 13,000 scholarly articles by authors affiliated with German institutions accepted for publication each year in Springer Nature journals, the agreement enables a vast portion of German research to be published openly.

Agreement highlights

  • The DEAL-Springer Nature agreement enables Open Access publishing of articles in over 2000 Springer Nature journals; the open access publishing costs are covered by repurposing former subscription fees via DEAL’s transitional “publish and read” cost model.

  • Institutions gain unlimited perpetual access for their readers to current and back issues of the entire Springer nature journal portfolio.

  • Thanks to the funding from the DFG, the Springer Nature journal archive has been acquired and is made available to German institutions free of charge. The archive provides seamless access to the national licence for the Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2002.

  • The cost of open access publishing and reading access in subscription journals are covered by repurposing former subscription fees via DEAL’s transitional “publish and read” cost model, in the per-article amount negotiated of Euro 2750.

  • The agreement also secures a 20% savings on the list Article Processing Charges (APC’s) of more than 400 fully open access journals and places a cap on APC price increases over the agreement period.