UK: Springer and JISC Sign a Licensing Deal For Open Access Publishing and Journal Access

Note: We recently posted that the type of agreement announced today (see below) in the UK was also signed on a national level in Austria (September 2015) and the Netherlands (November 2014).
Yesterday, Springer announced an institution-wide agreement with the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
From Springer:

Starting today, researchers in the UK will be able to publish their articles open access in over 1,600 Springer hybrid journals without cost barriers or administrative barriers. The Springer Compact agreement is a pilot that combines open access publishing and subscription access in one annual fee and will run from October 2015 until December 2018.
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Over the lifetime of the deal, Jisc and Springer will continue to monitor and evaluate the arrangement to ensure that it continues to meet UK higher education institutions’ needs and funding compliance requirements as the open access environment evolves.
Liam Earney, Director of Jisc Collections, said, “With this agreement, the amount of research made open access by UK authors will increase substantially. We have worked hard with Springer and institutions to devise an agreement that does this in a way that limits the costs and administration for institutions, whilst helping them to ensure they are compliant with the requirements of all research funders. Most importantly, we believe that this agreement demonstrates that it is possible to transition from subscription to open access in a way that is sustainable for institutions and publishers.”
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Chris Banks, Director of Library Services, Imperial College London, said, “I applaud Springer for working with Jisc Collections on this innovative new publishing business model. It is a model which will deliver open access to UK research findings but which considerably reduces the administrative and cost burden of doing so, for researchers, for institutions and for the publisher themselves. It allows academics maximum visibility of their work and it eliminates the messy article level transactional activity between libraries and the publisher.”

Read the Complete Announcement

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Funding, Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing