Max Planck Society and American Physical Society sign pilot transformative agreement

Hassle-free Open Access publishing in all Physical Review titles

July 13, 2020

The American Physical Society (APS) and the Max Planck Gesellschaft (MPG) have finalized the terms of a strategic partnership that allows MPG authors to easily publish open access in all hybrid and gold Physical Review journals at no direct cost to authors.

The Max Planck Society and the American Physical Society (APS) have finalized the terms of a strategic partnership that allows Max Planck authors to easily publish open access in all hybrid and gold Physical Review journals at no direct cost to authors. At the center of the collaboration is APS’s first “read and publish” pilot, covering the calendar year 2020. Both hybrid and fully open access peer-reviewed journals published by APS - including highly-selective flagship titles such as Physical Review Letters and Physical Review X - are covered under the read and publish pilot.

Under the new transformative agreement, the Open Access publication costs are covered by the institutional license fee, meaning that authors affiliated with any of 88 Max Planck institutes and research facilities can publish open access in the Physical Review journals without needing to spend time and resources on the invoicing and payment process. Upon publication their papers will be made immediately open access under a CC-BY license allowing broad access and reuse rights. The 2020 license also continues to provide MPG-affiliated readers access to the entire APS online library, including peer-reviewed research and review articles published from 1893 to the present.

Max Planck Vice President Prof. Klaus Blaum said, “The journals of APS are highly valued by our scientists and our peers globally, and this new agreement will enable the broadest possible readership for a significant portion of our peer-reviewed research, ultimately improving and accelerating the scientific process.”

“The pilot is designed to deliver tremendous value to researchers by providing the opportunity to conveniently publish open access in the most-read and highest-cited peer-reviewed journals in physics and related disciplines, broadly trusted and valued by researchers around the world for more than 127 years,” said APS Publisher Dr. Matthew Salter.

This new transformative agreement with APS marks an important development in the strategy of the Max Planck Society to repurpose its subscription investments in order to deliver open access publishing opportunities to authors affiliated with Max Planck institutes while, at the same time, contributing to the broader transition of today’s scholarly journals to open access in line with objectives Open Access 2020 Initiative.

Thanks to a growing number of agreements negotiated by the Max Planck Digital Library with many major publishers, Max Planck authors can choose to publish Open Access in a large number of journals where the publication fees will be fully covered by central library funds. Currently the list includes 8869 titles, 1350 full OA journals and 7519 hybrid OA journals.

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