Difference between revisions of "Springer Open Choice Agreement"

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Revision as of 15:43, 29 January 2009


In February 2008, Springer and MPG reached an agreement which includes Open Choice, Springer's open access scheme, for all researchers affiliated with a Max Planck Institute publishing in Springer's journals. During the period of the agreement, Springer and the MPG will evaluate the effects of open access on both authors and users. This includes the definition of a workflow to transfer the articles published under the Open Choice conditions to the MPG eDoc server.

Following concrete goals have been defined:

  • Increase the visibility and distribution of articles published under the Open Choice conditions
  • Improve article coverage on the MPG eDoc server
  • Develop requirements for projected agreements and generic usage scenarios for data transfer
  • Provide measures for statistics and monitoring

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Improving the visibility of Open Choice articles via CrossRef[edit]

From our point of view, improving the visibility of OA materials is very crucial for the success of Springers open access business model - and we believe that CrossRef could play an important role in distributing the access information. In the meantime we contacted CrossRef to inquire if CrossRef has considered to include access information (e.g. an OA tag) in its metadata records to distribute open access information for link resolving systems.

CrossRef answered that they have indeed and they proposed two ways to make OA information available for CrossRef: the first possibility would be first choice for the short way: Publishers would have to include an "Open Access" designation in the metadata when they register the DOI with CrossRef and then this would be available. A better way on the long run might be to tie it in with the CrossMark project CrossRef is working on. With CrossMark publishers would embed metadata in an article (HTML and PDF versions) and the metadata could inlcude an OA status designation. This would enable search engines to pick up the information. CrossRef is hoping to have a prototype of CrossMark within in the next few months.

Our request at Springer would be to realize the first option as soon as possible and to check on the long run if the Springer Metadata would be sufficient for the requirements of the CrossMark project.