Mixed reception for German open access deal with Springer Nature / Rebecca Trager. Royal Society of Chemistry 27 August 2019

Springer Nature has reached an open access publishing deal with 700 German research universities, but it faces some pushback

The academic publishing powerhouse Springer Nature has reached what it is touting as ‘the world’s most comprehensive open access agreement’ with a consortium of nearly 700 research universities in Germany. But there is some pushback to the arrangement.
The agreement, known as Project DEAL, was announced on 23 August and will be finalised later this year. It specifies that these German member institutions will be able to publish open access (OA) in both Springer Nature’s fully OA journals and its 1,900 hybrid journals, at least for the two years from 2020 to 2022. The deal is expected to see more than 13,000 open access articles from German researchers published each year.
There will be a ‘publish and read’ (PAR) component to the deal, which will be reflected in a per-article PAR fee of €2750 (£2480). Springer Nature will offer the participating institutions a 20% discount on the list price for some OA journals, and list price increases of article processing charges can rise by up to 3.5% per journal per year. Interestingly, this PAR element of the agreement does not include Nature and its sister journals. ... [mehr] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/mixed-reception-for-german-open-access-deal-with-springer-nature/3010886.article