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Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2013 10:27:03 +0100

PRESS RELEASE

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 individual 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 humanities, 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

Ulrike Lippe
Public Relations Manager
Tel. +49 (0)30-260 05 153
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Tina Planck
Max Planck Digital Library
Tel. +49 (0)89-38602249
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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, the
humanities, natural sciences, and law, in addition to more than 600
journals and digital media publications. www.degruyter.com

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. http://www.mpg.de