DEAL Agreements with Wiley, Springer Nature and Elsevier

The University of Kassel participates in the new DEAL contract with Elsevier. From 2024, members of the University of Kassel can use the open access publication options for their articles in Elsevier journals as part of DEAL. In addition, the University of Kassel will continue to participate in the new DEAL contracts with Wiley and Springer Nature from 2024. The open access publication option with these publishers is guaranteed without transition.

The German Rectors’ Conference negotiates a new contract model on behalf of the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany with the publishers Wiley, Springer Nature and Elsevier in the framework of DEAL and all German academic institutions can benefit from this. The agreements concluded grant access to most titles of the journal portfolio of these publishers. The agreements also include an Open Access publication component, which enables members of the participating institutions, including the University of Kassel, to publish their articles in most of the journals of the publishing houses without incurring any personal costs and making them available worldwide via Open Access. This applies both to articles in the Gold OA journals and the hybrid journals at the publishing houses, i.e. in subscription journals, which offer OA access for individual articles as an option. The maximum net article fee of EUR 2,000, which applies with our OA Publication Fund, does not apply within DEAL.

The OA policy at the University of Kassel recommends to publish Open Access. If you decide against the OA publication for your article in the framework of DEAL, the University of Kassel will still have to pay the article fee. Additionally, you will forego any greater reception and coverage for your article by doing so. You will find detailed information about why you should definitely make use of the Open Access option in this blog entry. More information is also available on the website of the DEAL Consortium.

The authorisation and author affiliation are checked by the publishing house in the background and confirmed by the University Library of Kassel. The allocation of the publication fees to the University of Kassel takes place in line with the affiliation of the corresponding author.

Being the (responsible) corresponding author, please specify the University of Kassel as your affiliation during the submission and publication process. This information should correspond with the manuscript and the publication itself.

If you are affiliated with several institutions, the University of Kassel (or a different DEAL-authorised institution) should be mentioned first. The specified institution should be the location where the research related to the article has taken place (e.g. if you have recently changed institution).

Please only use your institutional e-mail address at the ‘uni-kassel.de’ domain.

If you submit your article to an Open Access journal, you do not need to do anything else. If you have submitted it to a subscription journal, you will be requested as part of the publication workflow to select Open Access, once your article has been accepted for publication. Please then confirm the publishing house’s Open Access option.

As soon as you have selected Open Access, you will be requested to confirm the Creative Commons Attribution License for your article. While authors traditionally have transferred all their rights to their works to publishing houses, you retain the right under the CC BY licence to reuse your own work and freely and legally pass on your published articles so that academics around the world can read your work and build on it, provided that you are quoted correctly. The University Library recommends that you use the CC BY licence, if it is available for the relevant journal, as it enables the widest possible reuse and circulation for your article, while maintaining your copyright in the sense of the Open Access concept.

You can find more information on the publishing houses’ websites:

• Wiley: Open access agreement for authors at eligible German institutions
• Springer Nature: Open access agreement for Germany
• Elsevier: Agreement between Germany and Elsevier