Following the launch of SpringerOpen (www.springeropen.com), the Helmholtz Association has signed a new agreement for an open access membership. This agreement covers article processing charges for authors from the participating Helmholtz research centres for articles published in SpringerOpen and BioMed Central journals.
SpringerOpen journals are peer-reviewed open access journals in emerging and interdisciplinary fields that complement both the established Springer journal portfolios and BioMed Central's growing list of over 200 life science and biomedicine journal titles. SpringerOpen journals are e-only and publish articles under the Creative Commons Attribution license. According to this license, Springer will not reserve any exclusive commercial rights.
Both SpringerOpen as well as Biomed Central journals charge article processing fees to the author which make the journals' content immediately and freely available. The membership offering, introduced by BioMed Central, allows institutions to directly support the payment of these fees and facilitate the uptake of open access across their authors. Currently, authors from more than 340 institutions in 39 countries benefit from these memberships taking on full or partial payment of article processing fees.
"We feel that the Springer open access journal portfolio is a good match for the spectrum of the six main Helmholtz research areas (Energy, Earth and Environment, Health, Key Technologies, Structure of Matter, and Aeronautics, Space and Transport). We are pleased to enter into this partnership opening new chances to develop an open access forum for research results of our scientists. The agreement is part of our mission to establish long-term mechanisms securing reasonable publication charges for open access journals," says Dr. Bernhard Mittermaier, Head of the Central Library of Forschungszentrum Jülich.
"We are delighted to see that the Helmholtz Association expresses its support for SpringerOpen. SpringerOpen expands the option to publish in fully open access journals to all scientific areas and it is encouraging to see the scientific community reacting so quickly," says Bettina Goerner, Manager Open Access at Springer.
The Helmholtz Association (www.helmholtz.de) contributes to solving major challenges facing society, science and industry with top scientific achievements in six research areas: Energy, Earth and Environment, Health, Key Technologies, Structure of Matter, and Aeronautics, Space and Transport. With 30,000 employees in 16 research centres and an annual budget of approximately 3 billion euros, the Helmholtz Association is Germany's largest scientific organisation. The Helmholtz Association was one of the initial signatories of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access in 2003.
Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) is a leading global scientific publisher, delivering quality content through innovative information products and services. The company is also a trusted provider of local-language professional publications in Europe, especially in Germany and the Netherlands. In the science, technology and medicine (STM) sector, the group publishes around 2,000 journals and more than 6,500 new books a year, as well as the largest STM eBook Collection worldwide. Springer has operations in about 20 countries in Europe, the USA, and Asia, and more than 5,000 employees.
BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com) has been part of Springer Science+Business Media since 2008. Founded in 1999, the STM publisher has pioneered the open access publishing model. All peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are made immediately and freely accessible online, and are licensed to allow redistribution and reuse. BioMed Central is the largest open access publisher in the world.