Transformative agreement with PNAS

Three-year pilot agreement signed

May 04, 2023

The Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL), on behalf of the Max Planck Society, has reached a three-year transformative agreement with the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The agreement covers open access (OA) publishing of articles in PNAS.

The Max Planck Society has established a new open access agreement with the National Academy of Sciences, which allows authors to publish open access in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) without direct costs.

The three-year pilot agreement, which runs from May 1, 2023 through April 30, 2026, enables corresponding authors affiliated with the Max Planck Society to publish their research articles open access in PNAS without paying individual article processing charges (APCs). The agreement also includes access to PNAS content for all Max Planck Society researchers.

The agreement covers the open access publication charges for Max Planck affiliated corresponding authors centrally, meaning that authors or institutes will not be invoiced. This open access agreement is part of the Max Planck Society’s strategy to enable a large-scale transition of today’s scholarly journals to open access.

Ádám Dér, Head of the Scientific Information Provision at MPDL, commented: “This transformative agreement with PNAS marks another important step in enabling Max Planck authors to publish their research open access, increasing their global impact and readership. By making our researchers’ work widely and freely available to fellow scientists wherever they may be, we further implement the vision of the OA2020 Initiative.”

To publish open access without having to pay Article Publication Charges (APCs), the following criteria must be met:

  • A Max Planck author must be the corresponding author of the article.
  • The author is affiliated with a Max Planck Institute and publishes under this affiliation - the Max Planck Institute must be stated in the article.
  • The article is accepted between May 1, 2023 and Apr 30, 2026.

  • The article matches one of these types: Research Reports, Brief Reports

  • The articles is published under a CC-BY license

  • Charges for additional options (color-in-print, posters etc.) are NOT covered by this agreement

When submitting, a Max Planck email address should be used (if possible) and the Max Planck affiliation should be stated. During the production process, PNAS and Max Planck Digital Library will verify author eligibility.

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