25. August 2010 Helmholtz Head Office
Helmholtz backs open access publishing
The Helmholtz Association has signed up for open access membership with Springer scientific publishing. The agreement means that the research centres in the Helmholtz Association will pay the fees charged to authors for articles published in SpringerOpen and BioMed Central journals. The Helmholtz Open Access Project assisted in the proceedings.
SpringerOpen journals are peer-reviewed open access journals in new, future-focused and interdisciplinary fields. They supplement Springer’s existing portfolio and that of BioMed Central, which offers over 200 open access journals from the life sciences and biomedicine. SpringerOpen journals appear exclusively online and are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which enables free dissemination of copyrighted content. The license does not give Springer exclusive rights to published content.
Authors pay an open access fee for articles they publish in SpringerOpen and BioMed Central journals, and their articles immediately appear in the relevant publication at www.springerlink.com. Dr Bernhard Mittermaier, head of the Central Library at Forschungszentrum Jülich, is enthusiastic about the agreement: “We believe that the open access journals offered by Springer are a good fit for the six research fields pursued by the Helmholtz Association. We are excited to be embarking on a partnership that will open up new possibilities for developing an open access forum for the findings of our researchers. This agreement is a step towards our goal of establishing sustainable mechanisms for ensuring fair publication fees for open access journals.”
Bettina Goerner, Open Access Manager at Springer, said: “We are very pleased that the Helmholtz Association is supporting SpringerOpen. SpringerOpen will now be able to offer fully open access journals for all scientific disciplines. We were very encouraged to see how quickly such an important partner as the Helmholtz Association responded.”
The Helmholtz Association was one of the first to sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in 2003. The following year, the Helmholtz Association explicitly re-affirmed its position on open access in an open access policy passed by the Assembly of Members. The Helmholtz Open Access Project has been assisting researchers and the Helmholtz centres where they work in the implementation of open access since 2005.
You can find further information here: www.helmholtz.de/en/research/open_access
The Helmholtz Association contributes to solving major challenges facing society, science and the economy with top scientific achievements in six research fields: Energy, Earth and Environment, Health, Key Technologies, Structure of Matter, and Aeronautics, Space and Transport. With nearly 30,000 employees in 16 research centres and an annual budget of approximately €3 billion, the Helmholtz Association is Germany’s largest scientific organisation. Its work follows in the tradition of the great natural scientist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894). www.helmholtz.de
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