Infoletter // International Open Access Week 2019 @ MPI CBS

October 25, 2019

Dear everyone,

To celebrate that this week is International Open Access week, the CBS Open Access Initiative and the CBS Open Science Initiative would like to share some information about Open Access with you!

The Max Planck Society (MPS) has made it one of their key aspirations to make “its scientists’ research findings available for the benefit of the whole of humanity, free of charge whenever possible (Open Access)” . To facilitate the publication in Open Access journals, the MPS has, for example, created a central budget for Open Access publication charges, instated the Open Access ambassadors program, and strongly supports Projekt DEAL.

Article Processing Charges covered by MPS
The central budget of the MPS covers article processing charges for Open Access articles. For a continuously updated list of which publishers/journals are covered and which conditions must be met by MPS scientists, have a look at these websites:
Overview of publishers
Searchable list of journals

Open Access Ambassadors Program
The Max Planck PhDnet and the Max Planck Digital Library are reinstating the Open Access ambassadors program. At the Open Access Ambassadors Conference and Workshop on December 10-11, 2019, interested early career researchers will receive training on Open Access and Open Science topics. They will then take this knowledge back to their institutes to promote Open Access locally. We are very much looking forward to soon having Open Access Ambassadors at the institute again!

Projekt DEAL Open Access deals
The MPS plays a leading role in negotiating agreements of Projekt DEAL, an alliance that seeks to conclude so-called “publish and read” agreements with some of the largest scientific publishing groups for German universities and research institutes. The aim of these agreements is to prevent institutes from having to pay journals twice: once for publishing Open Access articles and once for the journal subscription to read paywalled articles. Instead, universities and institutes would pay a fee based on the number of Open Access articles they publish that also covers subscription to the journal. Projekt DEAL’s negotiations have already yielded a successful deal with publisher Wiley that has been effective since July 2019. Find out more.

The Max Planck Digital Library is also currently organizing an information session about the deal with Wiley and the Open Access transformation – we are for example planning to bring this workshop series to our institute as well. We will keep you updated!


Recently, Projekt DEAL has been negotiating the details of a publish & read contract with Springer Nature. The deal is expected to be finalized and published this fall and is “expected to see well over 13,000 articles a year from German researchers published open access”. While this deal does not cover all Nature-branded journals, it covers many journals relevant to our institute, such as Nature Communications and Scientific Reports.

Preprints: An easy way to Green Open Access
In addition to making one’s articles Open Access at a journal (“Gold Open Access”), one can also upload manuscripts as a preprint, for example on BioRxiv (“Green Open Access”). Most journals in our field already allow articles that have been uploaded as a preprint. You can find out if the journal of your choice allows preprints here.


Preprints are a great way to reach the community much earlier than with regular journal publications, and have been shown to increase citations and mentions (Fraser et al 2019. bioRxiv, 673665). They also provide the opportunity to get feedback early on. Interesting platforms for reviewing preprints are for example: https://www.prereview.org/, https://prelights.biologists.com/, https://pubpeer.com/.
To facilitate the integration of preprints in our workflow, the Open Science initiative is currently working on organizing a Preprint Journal Club, in which we will read and review preprints, allowing us to read even more recent manuscripts than in a regular journal club.
Another option for achieving Open Access is self-archiving the published version of your manuscript, for example at MPG.PuRe.
For more information on Gold vs. Green OA, see here.

Do you have questions regarding Open Access? The Open Access initiative offers a publication service: we provide support during the publication process, for example by helping you to select the most suitable publication channel for your publication.

Are you interested in Open Access? Join the Open Access initiative (contact: Karina, naethe@cbs.mpg.de)!

Karina, Gisela, and Mariella from the Open Access and Open Science initiatives

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