MDC Library

The library has moved and is now located in house 10, left-hand side of the building. The library is currently open Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. - 4 p.m.

109th Helmholtz Open Science Newsletter of June 18th, 2025

Access to trial version of JoVE Core: Molecular Biology. In 11 chapters with 157 animated lessons and 33 videos, it demonstrates the molecular processes of the cell through clear and concise animated video lessons: from protein structure to gene expression. In addition, scientist-in-action videos demonstrate the application of these concepts through real experiments in modern laboratories

In January 2020 the second contract of Projekt DEAL was concluded with Springer Nature. The agreement is considered as the world’s largest transformative Open Access agreement to date. It enables all scientists in Germany to publish open access (oa) with Springer Nature and gives full reading access to the publisher’s journal portfolio.

If you are a corresponding author affiliated with the MDC (MDC cost center), you are entitled to publish your articles Open Access at no extra costs for you in more than 1,900 hybrid journals of Springer Nature (from January 2020). Nature journals (with the exception of Nature Communications) are not included in the DEAL contract.

The fees will completely be covered by the library of the MDC and are part of the German DEAL agreement. Publication fees for the more than 600 fully Open Access journals will continue to be covered by the open access publication fund of the library.

MDC staff and guests working from home without VPN/VDI can access all licensed content by the following publishers via Shibboleth: Cell Press, Elsevier, Nature, NEJM, Oxford University Press, Portland Press, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley. Please select the option "Sign in via your institution" or "Institutional Login" on the publisher's website and log in with your MDC credentials.

Many scientific publishers and platforms have made their publications on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 available free of charge or have expanded access to their contents, including Elsevier, Springer-Nature and Wiley.

In January 2019, the scientific publisher Wiley and the Projekt DEAL signed the first contract for a nationwide publish&read model, which enables an improved provision of information and an expansion of open access publishing.

In the spirit of a successful open access transformation in Germany, this contract meets also the criteria of the European funding agencies organized in the cOAlition S. Project DEAL was set up by the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany and includes nearly 700 academic institutions in Germany, among them also the Max Delbrück-Center (MDC).

The contract runs for a period of three years (2019-2021). Scientists of the MDC will get permanent reading access to all journals of Wiley and the possibility of open access publishing, at no extra costs for the authors. The MDC library will take over the full costs by an annual fee. The contract includes:

• Perpetual access to the entire porfolio of electronic journals of Wiley (around 1700 titles) back to the publication year 1997.
• Open access publishing of primary research and review articles at no charge for submitting corresponding authors of the MDC in gold open access and subscription journals. Concerning gold open access journals, nothing changes for MDC authors as the publication charges were already paid by the publication fund of the library. But we will receive a discount of 20% on Wiley’s list price of the publication charges.
• Preservation of authors' rights, because the copyright will no longer be transferred to the publisher but remains with the authors. The articles will usually be published under a cc-by license (only a few journals are only available with a cc-by-nc and cc-by-nc-nd license).