An agreement between most of Austria’s university libraries and the academic publisher Springer Nature, first signed in 2016, has been extended until December 2021.
The deal, which involves most members of the Austrian Academic Library Consortium and was announced on 3 September, will extend signatory institutions’ access to the content of the company’s subscription journals and their ability to publish in its open-access journals at no extra cost. It will last until 31 December 2021 and is backdated to 1 January 2019.
Ulrike Fenz-Kortschak, interim director of the consortium, told Research Professional News that a clause in the contract expressly forbade disclosure of how much the deal is worth. The consortium uses a cost-sharing model based on how many articles each member institution publishes. In a press release, consortium representatives said that the agreement makes open-access publishing easier for authors.
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