The Max Planck Society and De Gruyter Sign Agreement for Open Access Publishing

Berlin/Munich, 24 January 2013 – The Max Planck Society and the academic publishing house De Gruyter have signed a groundbreaking agreement to cooperate in the publication of Open Access books.

The agreement covers texts intended for publication by scholars at the more than 80 individ- ual Max Planck institutes working around the world today. It encompass the full range of disciplines in which the Max Planck Society is active, including the natural sciences, social sciences, and humani- ties, and applies to both monographs and anthologies.

“Our collaboration with De Gruyter will enable us to offer our scholars a unified platform – both from a legal and an organizational perspective – for publishing books in Open Access,” explains Ralf Schimmer, Director of the Department of Scientific Information Provision at the Max Planck Digital Library. “In this way, we’re responding to an increasing number of requests from the Max Planck institutes, and are extending the support we give for Open Access publishing from journal articles to the arena of books.”

De Gruyter is providing the Max Planck Society an attractive opportunity to disseminate its content to the broadest possible audience. Alongside free, global access to content at De Gruyter Online (www.degruyter.com), print versions will also be released.

“Our agreement with the Max Planck Society underscores that De Gruyter’s Open Access model is a groundbreaking form of academic publishing,” says Anke Beck, Vice President of Publishing at De Gruyter. “Publications from the internationally renowned institutes of the Max Planck Society will enrich our program with the highest quality content across all fields of research.”

Already in the past several years De Gruyter has successfully published a number of Open Access books in collaboration with a variety of ongoing research projects, including with the Berlin College of Antiquities’ Cluster of Excellence project The Formation and Transformation of Space and Knowledge in Ancient Civilizations (TOPOI) and with the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging (MEA) at the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy.

Contact: UlrikeLippe, PublicRelationsManager, Tel. +49(0)30-26005 153

Contact: Tina Planck, MaxPlanckDigitalLibrary, Tel. +49(0)89-909311249

 

 

De Gruyter: The academic publishing house De Gruyter can look back on a history spanning over 260 years. The Berlin-based group of companies releases over 850 new titles each year in the fields of medicine,thehumanities, naturalsciences,andlaw,inaddition tomorethan 600journalsanddigital mediapublications.
 

The Max Planck Society: The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is an independent, non-profit research organization. It primarily funds research at its own institutions, which conduct basic research in the natural, biological, and social sciences, as well as in the humanities.

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