1. Max Planck Society and Springer: Combining Subscription Costs and Open Access 10th European ICOLC Fall Meeting Munich, 19-22 October 2008 Dr Ralf Schimmer & Dr Antje Michel Max Planck Society, Max Planck Digital Library, Munich, Germany

2. Ralf Schimmer20 October 2008Page 1 Outline  Context: MPS and Open Access Who we are  Approaching Springer: Falling Apart and Putting it Back Together What we did  The New Agreement: Combining Subscription Costs and Open Access What it is about

3. Ralf Schimmer20 October 2008Page 2 The Max Planck Society (MPS) 78 Institutes in 3 Sections: 29 ChemPhysTech 30 Biomedical 19 Humanities & Social Sciences Highly distributed organization: One organization; but treated and operated like a consortium 74 local libraries & MPDL as central unit Budget 1.4 Bill. EUR (public funding) Staff 12,500 Total Employees 4,500 Researchers large number of visiting scholars The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is an independent, non-profit research organization - basic research - dedicated to scientific excellence

4. Ralf Schimmer20 October 2008Page 3 MPS and Open Access  Initiator & host of Berlin Conference & Declaration (Oct 2003)  http://oa.mpg.de (currently 255 signatories worldwide) http://oa.mpg.de  Broad understanding of and approach to Open Access  The serials crisis of course does matter…  …but the thrust for OA comes even more so from “eScience” and the requirements for the emerging new ways of scholarly communication  Interest in OA Green…  MPS Institutional Repository eDoc since 2002  …but our true concern is with OA Gold  Various MPS-wide Article Charge Agreements since 2004  Unified budget for subscription and publication costs since 2005  Our Springer deal fits in this framework.

5. Ralf Schimmer20 October 2008Page 4 Outline  Context: MPS and Open Access Who we are  Approaching Springer: Falling Apart and Putting it Back Together What we did  The New Agreement: Combining Subscription Costs and Open Access What it is about

6. Ralf Schimmer20 October 2008Page 5 Approaching Springer Act 1: Sequence of Escalation  It started with growing concern about the performance of Springer over the years  Unhappiness with overall stagnation and very unfavorable cost and usage relation  When renewal of 3-year deal came up last year, we demanded a very significant reduction in price  In a series of meetings Springer turned out to be less responsive than we expected  Backed by our scientific boards, we saw only the way of escalation and cancelled our license agreement (to avoid automatic renewal) – at the end of September 2007  This act was accompanied by unilateral press release.

7. Ralf Schimmer20 October 2008Page 6 Approaching Springer Act 2: Finding Back to Business  From the beginning, Springer had shown a two-fold strategy: a)No (or little) compromise in terms of revenues b)Attempt to make content package bigger and more attractive in order not to sacrifice income  Even after cancellation some contacts continued  Particularly in the domain of Open Access/Open Choice, where we had received early on a proposal similar to the Dutch universities  While we prepared ourselves and the entire Max Planck Society for the post-Springer period, new talks were initiated (late November)  Final agreement was reached 20 Dec 2008  Letter of intent signed 29 Jan 2008  Joint press release issued 4 Feb 2008  Complete license agreement signed 23 June 2008.

8. Ralf Schimmer20 October 2008Page 7 Outline  Context: MPS and Open Access Who we are  Approaching Springer: Falling Apart and Putting it Back Together What we did  The New Agreement: Combining Subscription Costs and Open Access What it is about

9. Ralf Schimmer20 October 2008Page 8 Essence of Agreement  The agreement combines subscription costs with Open Access  Compared with previous agreement, MPS could achieve:  Significantly more content (journals, LB and books series)  More rights (perpetual access at no maintenance cost; hosting rights)  Reduced price for optional print incl. books  Contained total costs  No price increase within 2-year contract life-time  Full Open Choice component at no additional costs  Big deal got even bigger; but without increasing the price  Agreement set up as experiment for 2 years to be evaluated by the two parties in 2009

10. Ralf Schimmer20 October 2008Page 9 Open Choice Subject Terms of Contract  Open Choice publication for all articles by MPS Scientists (not limited to corresponding authors and not limited in number) in all Springer Journals at no additional costs  According to acceptance date between 1 Jan 2008 and 31 Dec 2009  Pre-deal estimate: 500-700 articles p.a.  Transfer of the publisher PDFs and metadata of all entitled Open Choice articles to store in the institutional repositories of MPS  Initial delivery in September 2008, satisfactory support by Springer  Improvement of the visibility of Open Choice @ SpringerLink  Direct search capability for Open Choice articles announced by Springer  Combination of Open Choice and affiliation search requested  Creation of Open Choice article lists incl. download capabilities requested  OA tag in article metadata for CrossRef link resolving suggested  Regular meetings to set up workflows, to improve the cooperation and to identify and solve current challenges  Third meeting projected for the end of October; good and open atmosphere; sometimes the realization of requirements takes too long.

11. Ralf Schimmer20 October 2008Page 10 Central Challenges for Handling Open Choice  Identification of the Institute affiliation of MPS authors  Standard solution: Modification of Springer’s Publication Form  Additional interventions: Post-processing and corrections on our request possible at any time  Monitoring of publication output  Monthly reports by Springer  Data delivery  Current solution: Monthly delivery of new content via FTP Server, issued articles, monthly processed  Perspectives: Data harvesting via OAI interface  Data transfer into MPS repositories and data check  Current challenge to be solved; internal working group established

12. Ralf Schimmer20 October 2008Page 11 Modification of Springer‘s Publication Form

13. Ralf Schimmer20 October 2008Page 12 Modification of Springer‘s Publication Form

14. Ralf Schimmer20 October 2008Page 13 Metadata Requirements of MPS as Stipulated by Mutual Agreement  Name of all Authors  Affiliation  Typ of copyright license  DOI  Title of the journal  ISSN of the journal  Full text URL of the article PDF  Date of acceptance  Date of publication (online)  Date of publication (print)  Volume of the journal  Issue of the journal  Pages of the article

15. Ralf Schimmer20 October 2008Page 14 Performance Monitor  Number of MPS Open Choice articles since 1 Jan 2008  227 articles identified through the Springer Publication Form  15 articles identified & processed through our intervention  ?? articles yet to be identified & handled  We expect creation of Yearbook 2008 to trigger further interventions  MPS’s and Springer’s initial assumptions of 500-700 articles per annum have yet to be met  Possible explanations for lacking behind:  The wording in the publication form is not clear enough  Our information for the authors was not clear enough  Our authors are not that interested in using the Open Choice option  First-year experience with a complex new mode of organizing things

16. Ralf Schimmer20 October 2008Page 15 Information Activities @ MPS Concerning the Open Choice Agreement  Press release about the agreement for external and internal information  Information via mailing lists for MPS scientists and librarians  Information on various web pages and wikis  Dedicated contact person @ MPDL for author support  Information flyer for MPS scientists and librarians (print/online)

17. Ralf Schimmer20 October 2008Page 16 Conclusion  Interesting, challenging and perhaps path-breaking arrangement  New experience, new challenges, new workflows  Too early to call…  …but it will be interesting to evaluate next year  …and to see whether and how we can continue.

18. Ralf Schimmer20 October 2008Page 17 Thank you for your attention! Dr Ralf Schimmer Max Planck Digital Library schimmer@mpdl.mpg.de