Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals signs Open Access agreement with Max Planck Society
26 October 2011
Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals (BQFJ) and the German Max Planck Society (MPS) announced today that they have signed an agreement whereby open access publication fees for BQFJ journals articles will be paid directly out of a fund supporting researchers from the Max Planck Institutes. The prestigious agreement bolsters the publishing company’s growth and the visibility of its journals platform, QScience.com .
The Max Planck Society, is one of the world’s leading research organizations whose researchers have an international reputation for scientific excellence. Since its inception in 1948, the MPS has seen 17 Nobel Laureates rise from its ranks. In 2003, MPS was the co-initiator of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities and since then has demonstrated consistently strong leadership in the promotion of open access to research results. Article-Processing-Charges for all articles where the corresponding author is affiliated with a Max Planck Institute will now be covered by a central fund.
BQFJ publishes a multi-disciplinary portfolio of open access journals titles through the QScience.com site, and this MPS partnership is a major milestone for the burgeoning journals platform, which will be a year old in December. The support from MPS shows great confidence in BQFJ’s potential and development while recognizing it as one of the most dynamic publishers of high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarly content.
Arend Küster, Managing Director of BQFJ said: “We are delighted to be collaborating with MPS in this way and are welcoming submissions from highly-esteemed MPS researchers. We encourage them to publish with us and to promote open access to research literature more broadly. We are working together to develop new and innovative ways to collaborate with MPS authors, progressively making the submission and publishing process as seamless as possible.”
Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals applies the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0) to all published articles. Under the CC license, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles from BQFJ journals, so long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers. Thus, the contents of all open access BQFJ journals are freely accessible by the reader, worldwide via the internet.
The BQFJ website,QScience.com, provides immediate, worldwide and free access to the full text of its peer-reviewed research articles and offers the so-called gold road to open access for all of its journal articles.
BQFJ publishes online, peer-reviewed journals for a broad variety of subject areas, from cardiology research with theAswan Heart Centre Science & Practice Series, edited by Magdi Yacoub, to Contemporary Islamic Studies, edited by Dr Hatem Al Karanshawy, to the International Review of Law, edited by John Truby. In May, BQFJ launched the highly-innovative Journal QScience Connect which is envisioned to become the region’s premier broadly-scoped journal, accepting submissions from researchers around the world, in all fields.