Max Planck Society strikes OA deal with PLoS

The Max Planck Society (MPS) has signed a deal with the Public Library of Science (PLoS) to centrally fund publication fees of MPS scientists. The aim is to avoid burdening the budget of single Max Planck Institutes when their researchers publish in the seven PLoS open-access journals.

For papers accepted in PLoS journals after 1 July 2008, MPS will pay the publication fee directly to PLoS from central funds for all articles where the corresponding author is affiliated with a Max Planck Institute.

'PLoS is a top quality open-access publisher. We are pleased to support a seminal publication model with this collaboration and thus facilitate publishing for our scien-tists in this interesting spectrum of titles,' said Ralf Schimmer, head of the Department of Scientific Information Provision of the Max Planck Digital Library.

MPS was a co-initiator of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003). It believes that research funding should include allocations for making research results freely available.