MPDL open access books partnership agreement

Information for authors

If you’re affiliated with a participating Max Planck Society institution, you may receive a discount on the standard Book Publishing Charge (BPC) when you publish your book OA, under a CC BY licence.

More than 80 institutions are participating in the institutional OA book agreement between Springer Nature and Max Planck Society. This means, authors affiliated with these institutions may receive a discount on the standard Book Publishing Charge (BPC) to publish their book OA, under a CC BY licence. Max Planck Society will cover the costs remaining after the discount is applied on a pro-rata basis.


The agreement covers all Springer Nature book imprints, ensuring your work is freely accessible and discoverable to all communities across science, technology, medicine, the humanities and social sciences. Your work will also be available to readers around the world via Springer Nature's content platform SpringerLink. 

Learn more about your eligibility

Participating institutions
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Benefits of publishing your book series open access

Springer Nature books represent high quality

  • OA books published by Springer Nature represent high-quality research. We only accept them for publication if, following peer review, they are judged to meet the same high standards that we apply to all Springer Nature books.
  • Springer Nature OA books are produced by the same teams that work on our non-OA books, from commissioning and production to online and print publication and dissemination. This means that in all aspects of publishing our OA books meet the same high threshold for quality that we expect across our programme.

We support promotion and visibility of our partners’ OA books

  • Our team of experienced marketing professionals around the world ensure that partner book series are promoted on Springer Nature websites, via social media, alerts and newsletters, and at conferences. We can also display your logo prominently on the book itself.

Open access books receive more usage than non-OA books on average

  • On average, OA books on SpringerLink are downloaded ten times more than our non-OA books – a significant benefit of open access. Actual usage of our OA books is even greater as our OA books can also be downloaded free of charge from third-party platforms.
  • Our OA books are 2.4 times more and are mentioned online in news stories and social media 10 times more than non-OA books.
  • Authors are provided with an overview of the reach and impact of their book on SpringerLink, which shows downloads, citations and online mentions.
  • We are happy to provide our publishing partners with regular usage reports to demonstrate the benefits of open access.

Global dissemination across multiple platforms

  • All our OA books are hosted on our industry-leading platform, SpringerLink, which receives 285 million visits per year.
  • All our OA books are listed on the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), and we also work with around 200 other abstracting and indexing services, including Web of Science, Scopus, NCBI bookshelf and the OAPEN Library. 
  • In order to promote the widest possible discovery, we also release all Springer Nature OA books on major service providers Google Books, Amazon Kindle, and Apple iBooks. 
  • Authors and publishing partners may, in addition, host OA books on their own websites.
  • All titles are DRM free: users can download, print, and save eBooks. MARC records are available for integration into library discovery services.

CC BY licences support the greatest possible dissemination and re-use

  • Open access books are freely available for anyone to download, share, and re-use. Springer Nature is the only major publisher to offer the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) as its default licence for OA books. This is the most open licence and allows any form of re-use providing the original publication is credited. We are also happy to discuss use of alternative Creative Commons licences if preferred.

Publishing partner/author retains copyright

  • Partners (and/or authors) publishing their books OA with Springer Nature retain full copyright in their work.

All OA books can be published in print on demand

  • We offer a print-on-demand option for OA books, as we recognise that many readers continue to value print.
  • The print edition is made available at a reduced price compared to standard monographs as most costs are covered via the OA fee (book processing charge). This also helps to increase dissemination.