German Max Planck Society cancels licensing agreement with Springer

Last week the German Max Planck Society (MPG) cancelled their licensing agreement with Springer. Starting January 1st, MPG scientists no longer have access to the 1200 Springer journals through the SpringerLink interface.

This is an important announcement, because the MPG is one of the largest research organizations in Germany and Springer the second largest STM (Science, Technology, Medicine) publisher after Elsevier. Just a few weeks before this announcement, both the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Göttingen announced that they will pay their authors for Open Access in Springer journals (Springer Open Choice).

Time will tell whether these announcements are coincidences or the part of a larger trend from a subscriber-pays to an author-pays model.