Max Planck Society terminates licensing contract with Springer publishing house
Heise Online, October 19, 2007

Following several fruitless rounds of talks the Max Planck Society (MPG ) has, effective January 1, 2008, terminated the online contract with the Springer publishing house which for eight years now has given all institutes electronic access to some 1,200 scientific journals. The analysis of user statistics and comparisons with other important publishing houses had shown that Springer was charging twice the amount the MPG still considered justifiable for access to the journals, the Society declared. "And that 'justifiable' rate is still higher than comparable offers of other major publishing houses," a spokesman of the Max Planck Digital Library told Heise Online....

According to the MPG the failure of the talks with Springer marks "what for now is the high point" in a dispute with a number of globally operating scientific publishing houses. The soaring prices in the scientific information domain have already caused a change of attitude in a number of players. Thus MPG is one of the initiators of the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and the Humanities" -- the key demand of which is open access to the results of publicly funded research -- which to date has been signed by more than 240 scientific organizations.

When publishing houses have the market power to charge excessive prices and the legislator is unwilling to subject such inappropriate behavior to any form of legal control the only course that remains is for the scientific community to take matters into its own hands, the MPG stated. "Even at the very last minute the Springer publishing house had not been prepared to lower its inflated prices," MPG Vice President Kurt Mehlhorn said. "The MPG therefore had had no other option but to terminate the contract," he added.

Posted By Peter Suber to Open Access News at 10/19/2007 11:22:00 A

Additional note from George S. Porter, California Institute of Technology:

The Max Planck Society, for those unfamiliar, operates 80 research institutes with more than 12,000 staff members and 9,000 Ph.D. students, post-docs, guest scientists and researchers, and student assistants. Last week's Nobel prizes honored Gerhard Ertl (Chemistry, Fritz Haber Institute) and the UN IPCC (Peace, Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology).

In US-centric terms, my interpretation is that this is roughly equivalent to all of the National Institutes of Health, the DoE labs (Los Alamos, Livermore, Fermi, Brookhaven, etc.), and the NASA research centers (JPL, Dryden, Langley, Glenn, Ames, etc.) cancelling all Springer titles for all locations.