If you are the corresponding author and affiliated with one of the more than 900 DEAL institutions, you are covered—even if your institution has not yet formally signed up.

The nationwide DEAL agreements apply to nearly all German universities, scientific institutions, federal institutes, government agencies and authorities, with slight variations from publisher to publisher. Check whether your institution is included:

• Wiley
• Springer Nature

The corresponding author is the person who oversees the manuscript and correspondence during the publication process.

The publisher will recognize your eligibility automatically, and your institution will verify your affiliation in the course of the publication process.

If you are not sure if your employment status qualifies as affiliation with one of the DEAL institutions, please check with your library. Authors not affiliated with a DEAL institution may contact the DEAL Operations support team for assistance.

Just follow your usual submission and publishing workflows and select open access when presented with the option. These are the two key checkpoints:

 1   State your affiliation

The publisher will ask you to confirm your affiliation in the course of the publication process, and, later, your institution will verify this. Please ensure the affiliation stated on the final paper matches the affiliation indicated in the publishing process.

If you are affiliated with more than one institution, please note that the first (primary) affiliation is the one that will be considered for the purposes open access publishing provided by the DEAL agreement.

If you have recently changed affiliation, you should claim affiliation with the institution where the majority of the research was done.

If you are unsure whether your employment status entitles you for open access publishing provided by DEAL (e.g., emeritus), please check with your library.

 2   Confirm open access with the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY)

If you are submitting to a fully open access journal, you are all set. If you are submitting to a subscription journal, you will be prompted to select open access in the course of the usual publishing workflows, after you are notified that your article has been accepted for publication. Confirm the respective open access option offered by the publisher (Springer Nature = "Open Choice"; Wiley = "Hybrid Open Access").

Once on the open access track, you will be guided to confirm the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) for your article. While authors have traditionally transferred all rights over their works to publishers, under the CC-BY license authors keep the right to re-use their own work and freely and legally share their published articles, granting scholars everywhere with permission to read and build upon their work—provided that credit for the original work is always given to the author.

For further information, check out the publishers' information pages:

• • Publishing in Wiley's fully open access journals
  • Publishing in Wiley's hybrid journals (hybrid journal portfolio)
  • Springer Nature's Projekt DEAL support page for authors

DEAL covers the cost of open access publishing in thousands of subscription-based, peer-reviewed journals across all disciplines. Additionally, special DEAL savings are applied on the article processing charges (APCs) of scores of fully open access journals. You can find lists of the subscription-based and fully open access journals comprised in the DEAL agreements here:

• Wiley
• Springer Nature
  Nature-branded subscription journals are not included in the DEAL agreement, but German institutions can participate in the separate, framework agreement covering open access publishing for their authors. Please get in touch with your open access officer or librarian to learn whether your institution participates.

The DEAL agreements cover open access publishing of original research articles and reviews. Some additional articles types are covered in Springer Nature journals.

The exact article types covered under each agreement are:

Wiley

• Primary Research Articles
• Review Articles

Springer Nature

• Original Papers
• Review Papers
• Brief Communications
• Editorial Notes
• Book Reviews
• Letters
• Reports

The Alliance of German Science Organizations (as well as cOAlition S) encourages authors to choose, wherever possible, the open license CC-BY for their published works.

The CC-BY license fruits the greatest possible use and re-use of your research, enabling scholars and scientists everywhere to learn from and build on the results of your research and increasing the potential of digital technologies in research, such as text and data mining, while ensuring that you are always given credit as the creator.

One of the core objectives of the Projekt DEAL negotiations with scholarly publishers is to give authors the greatest reach for their research, establishing the CC-BY license as the gold standard in scholarly publishing. Nevertheless, changing the system takes time, and while the majority of journals included in the DEAL agreements prompt authors to choose the CC-BY license by default, there are a few exceptions. In these cases, authors are encouraged to select the least restrictive Creative Commons license available.

It is standard practice for open access publishing costs to be covered by the institution of the corresponding author, who should also be the author who submits the manuscript, even in the case of articles with multiple authors.

The costs to publish your article openly are paid centrally by DEAL using an innovative and equitable cost structure that repurposes the former subscription funds of DEAL institutions and saves the German research community money.

Please note that the DEAL agreements cover the cost of open access publishing, but they do not cover any print-related services that you may order for your article in the process of publication, ie color charges, page charges, etc.; these are at your own expense.

Find out more about how the DEAL agreements restructure the financial streams of scholarly publishing to enable open access >>

No. Even if you decline this opportunity for greater impact, by giving up your copyright and making your article only visible to paid subscribers, DEAL has to pay for the service anyway. So why limit your readership to only those who can afford costly subscriptions?

The DEAL agreement is part of a broader strategy to gradually transition subscription-based journals to an open publication model for the benefit of science. Learn more about the DEAL strategy here.

To ensure that the special DEAL savings are applied and to alleviate the administrative burden on authors, Article Processing Charges (APCs) of fully open access journals are paid centrally via DEAL and your institution. More and more, institutions are setting up dedicated open access publishing funds, with the support of the DFG, but some institutions may still ask authors to contribute to covering open access publishing fees with their own research funds.

Contact your open access officer or librarian to find out what kind of support is available at your institution.

Through the DEAL agreements, your peer-reviewed articles can be published immediately and universally open access, with no paywall or embargo period, giving you the broadest possible readership and potential impact for your article.

Taking this opportunity to publish your article open access, you will contribute to a growing body of openly available research findings, enabling more profound, expansive and impactful studies, accelerating the process of science, itself, whereby new discoveries are built upon previously established results.

The Alliance of German Science Organizations, including the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), the German Rectors’ Conference, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the German Academic Exchange Service, the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat), the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, the Leibniz Association, and the Max Planck Society, have established Projekt DEAL to enable open access to research.

The research funding organizations of cOAlition S consider publications that are made freely and immediately available via transformative agreements, such as those negotiated by DEAL, to be fully compliant with the principles of Plan S.

Open access to research contributes to innovation across all aspects of our society. With immediate and open access to the research, doctors and health care works can immediately put the latest discoveries into practice, policy makers can make better-informed decisions, industry can apply new technologies and individuals can be empowered with authoritative information.