Researchers who are eligible to publish under the DEAL agreements with Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer Nature must be the corresponding author of the article and be affiliated with an institution participating in the DEAL agreement.

To check if your institution is part of a DEAL agreement, consult the lists linked below:

• Wiley

• Elsevier

• Springer Nature

If you are unsure about your eligibility due to your employment or emeritus status, please contact your institution's management or library.

For a successful Open Access publication within the DEAL framework , please note the following:

Primary affiliation: As the corresponding author (or submitting corresponding author), you must indicate the DEAL institution responsible for the publication fee as your primary affiliation. This applies to all stages of the publication process.

Multiple affiliations or affiliation changes: As a corresponding author with multiple associated institutions/affiliations, or after a change to a new institution, select the institution where the majority of the published research was conducted as your primary affiliation.

Institutional email address: If possible, always use your institutional email address throughout the publication process.

Open Access Option: If your article has been accepted for publication and you're publishing in a pure (gold/fully gold) OA journal, you don't need to do anything further. However, if you are publishing in a hybrid journal (i.e. a journal that is basically "closed access", but in which individual articles can be published open access), you should select the open access option offered, if it is not already preset (Wiley = "Hybrid Open Access"; Springer Nature = "Open Choice"; Elsevier = "Core Hybrid"). >> Please note that your institution will be charged even if you choose not to publish in the hybrid journals.

Creative Commons licence: Please confirm the Creative Commons licence for your article. If several licences are available, we recommend the CC-BY licence, in line with the Berlin Declaration on Open Access and the recommendation of the Alliance of German Science Organisations. It allows you to distribute your work freely and allows others to build on it, as long as they cite you. The choice of "non-commercial" CC-BY-NC/NC-ND licences is not recommended. For more information, see "Why should I opt for the open CC-BY license?"

DEAL covers the cost of open access publishing in thousands of subscription-based, peer-reviewed journals across all disciplines. Additionally, special DEAL savings are applied on the article processing charges (APCs) of scores of fully open access journals. You can find lists of the subscription-based and fully open access journals comprised in the DEAL agreements here:

• Wiley

• Springer Nature

• Nature-branded subscription journals are not included in the DEAL agreement, but German institutions can participate in the separate, framework agreementcovering open access publishing for their authors. Please get in touch with your open access officer or librarian to learn whether your institution participates.

• Elsevier

The DEAL agreements cover open access publishing of original research articles and reviews. Some additional articles types are covered in Springer Nature journals. The exact article types covered under each agreement are:

Wiley

• Primary Research Articles

• Review Articles

For a detailed list of Wiley's article types, including definitions, see:

>> Wiley DEAL Article types

Springer Nature

• Original Papers

• Review Papers

• Brief Communications

• Editorial Notes

• Book Reviews

• Letters

• Reports

Note on Springer Nature medical journals (Facharztzeitschriften): Articles in these journals will only be published Open Access under DEAL if they are a) not submitted by invitation (e.g. via a call for papers) and b) of the type "research article". Non-research articles in journals are excluded from the agreement (see list of Springer Nature journals).

Elsevier

• Full Length Articles

• Review Articles

• Case Reports

• Data in Brief

• Microarticle

• Original Software Publication

• Protocol

• Replication Study

• Short Communication

• Short Survey

• Video Article

Whereas in the past authors usually transferred their rights of use exclusively to the publisher, with DEAL you retain the rights to your work and determine the further use of your work yourself by granting a Creative Commons licence.

The Alliance of German Science Organisations (as well as the COAlition S) recommends using the Creative Commons licence CC-BY for scientific publications. CC-BY is the most liberal type of licence, allowing the widest possible reuse of your work and ensuring that you are credited as the author of the original.

DEAL aims to establish CC-BY as the standard licence for Open Access publishing. However, some journals now covered by DEAL do not yet automatically offer the CC-BY licence (and a few do not offer a CC-BY licence at all), so you will often be asked to select a CC licence type. In these cases, we ask you to always choose CC-BY if possible, as this is the only way to avoid legal uncertainties in the distribution and reuse of your works.

The choice of "non-commercial" CC-BY-NC/ NC-ND licences is not recommended, as it limits the possibilities of distribution and publishers must be granted a commercial use right by the CC licence, and this is usually exclusive, so that permission for commercial use by others, even by authors, requires the publisher's permission.

>> Learn more why CC BY is the best choice

The costs of DEAL contracts are covered by the participating institutions in the DEAL consortium, while the publishers' contractual partner is MPDL Services gGmbH, which in turn invoices the participating institutions. Therefore, publishers do not invoice authors or institutions directly. However, you may wish to check with your library or institution to see if there are any internal contributions to be made by scientific authors.

In general, the DEAL funding mechanism for open access publishing in subscription journals (so-called hybrid Open Access) is based on the reallocation of the former collective subscription expenditure of German universities and research institutions. Read more about this on the "Background and objectives" page.

Please note that the DEAL agreements cover the costs of Open Access publishing, but do not cover any print-related services that you may order for your article in the course of publication, e.g. colour charges, page charges, etc.; these are at your own expense.

To ensure that the special DEAL savings are applied and to alleviate the administrative burden on authors, Article Processing Charges (APCs) of fully open access journals are paid centrally via DEAL and your institution. More and more, institutions are setting up dedicated open access publishing funds, with the support of the DFG, but some institutions may still ask authors to contribute to covering open access publishing fees with their own research funds.

Contact your open access officer or librarian to find out what kind of support is available at your institution.

No. Even if you decline this opportunity for greater impact, by giving up your copyright and making your article only visible to paid subscribers, DEAL has to pay for the service anyway. So why limit your readership to only those who can afford costly subscriptions?

The DEAL agreement is part of a broader strategy to gradually transition subscription-based journals to an open publication model for the benefit of science. Learn more about the DEAL strategy here.

Through the DEAL agreements, your peer-reviewed articles can be published immediately and universally open access, with no paywall or embargo period, giving you the broadest possible readership and potential impact for your article.

Taking this opportunity to publish your article open access, you will contribute to a growing body of openly available research findings, enabling more profound, expansive and impactful studies, accelerating the process of science, itself, whereby new discoveries are built upon previously established results.

Your Open Access publication under DEAL meets the requirements of many research funders, such as the EU and the DFG. While research funders used to allow subsequent secondary publication on a document server (green open access), they are now increasingly demanding immediate open access to the original publication, for example the funders organised in the cOAlition S.

The DEAL agreements were negotiated on behalf of all the major German science organisations, which have for many years supported the goal of switching to open access by default. Read more about the background and aims of DEAL.

Open access to research contributes to innovation across all aspects of our society. With immediate and open access to the research, doctors and health care works can immediately put the latest discoveries into practice, policy makers can make better-informed decisions, industry can apply new technologies and individuals can be empowered with authoritative information.