Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals with Max Planck for OA

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from Shania Khan.  --Peter Suber.]

Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals signs Open Access agreement
with Max Planck Society

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 Koester, 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 the Aswan 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
3journal, accepting submissions from researchers around the
world, in all fields.