Fachhochschule Dortmund joined the new DEAL transformation agreement with the academic publisher Elsevier on January 1, 2024. This was negotiated by the German Rectors' Conference on behalf of the Alliance of German Science Organizations. Similar agreements with the publishers Wiley and Springer Nature have been in place via the DEAL consortium since 2019 and 2020 respectively, and Elsevier is now another important publisher.
The DEAL contracts enable German researchers to publish in open access in a wide range of scientific journals. The long-term goal is to contain the costs of scientific publishing and provide free access to as much of the scientific literature as possible. All three agreements are based on the "Publish and Read" model. The "Publish" component allows researchers at participating institutions (e.g. Fachhochschule Dortmund) to publish open access in a total of more than 5,800 journals from publishers. And the "Read" component grants all members of the institutions access to almost the entire range of e-journals from Wiley, Springer Nature and now also Elsevier.
Fachhochschule Dortmund covers the publication fees for its researchers. More detailed information on the DEAL contracts and on Open Access in general can be found on the corresponding page of the library: