It is part of the new agreement between the Max Planck Society and Springer that authors affiliated with any Max Planck Institute and not limited to corresponding authors are entitled to publish their journal articles open access in Springer’s Open Choice program at no additional costs. This applies for all journal articles which get accepted by Springer between January 1st, 2008 and December 31st, 2009. That agreement concerning Open Choice doesn’t extend to the articles in book serials of Springer.
Below, the relevant details of the publication process. You may forward the link to this page to potential corresponding authors who are affiliated with other institutions.
When a submitted article gets accepted, the corresponding author will receive an initial email from the publisher. This email contains a link to a publication form that every corresponding author is requested to fill out in order to authorize the publication process. In this publication form the corresponding author has to decide (among other things) whether to publish open choice or conventional. This workflow has been in existence for a while so that many of the authors of MPS may already be familiar.
The new and for your belongings important part rules the Open Choice publication for authors that are affiliated with the Max Planck Society at no additional costs. To obtain Open Choice the corresponding author should make one very important step: Right at the first entry mask of the publication form, titled “welcome”, the author should indicate if he/she or one of his/her co-authors is affiliated with the Max Planck Society. Please note: Whether your publication will be published open choice depends on this declaration! Please choose the affiliation as “Max Planck Institute – Germany” if you are the corresponding author or rather advert the corresponding author of your publication to this aspect!
After several additional indications you will get informed at the end of the declaration process that you as affiliated with the Max Planck Society (the precise wording in the publication form is “Max Planck Institutes – Germany”) will get Open Choice at no additional costs. If you finalize the declaration process successfully your article will be published Open Choice very quickly.
The publisher PDF version of this article will then also be delivered to the institutional repository of the Max Planck Society, where it will be stored and can be made open access as well. This agreement enables the enhancement of the visibility of your Open Access Publications, as our institutional repositories (such as eDoc) makes accession of relevant search engines, for example for Google Scholar possible. Workflows to that extent are currently under discussion with Springer as well as with the libraries of the Max Planck Institutes.
If you have further questions with regard to this process, please contact Tina Planck .
