Die Bibliothek ist eine Spezialbibliothek mit Sammelschwerpunkten in den jeweiligen Arbeitsgebieten des Instituts: biomedizinische Optik, Biophysik, molekulare Biomechanismen, molekulare Neurobiologie und Zellphysiologie.

F1000 Research is an open research and open access publishing platform, providing a suite of publishing services directly to researchers, research funders and institutions. The platform supports innovative features such as post-publication peer review, open peer review, and publication of negative results. The Max Planck Society covers article-processing charges for the open access journal F1000Research centrally. Further details are available on the MPDL website.

The Online Contents service of the Special Subject Collection Political Science and Peace Research is part of the Online Contents database. It offers access to tables of contents of more than 870 journals relevant for study and research. New journals were added until December 2013 by the Special Subject Collection. Thus the database contains approximately 1.478,600 records of journal articles and reviews.

Walter De Gruyter publishes a wide variety of content covering humanities, medicine, the sciences and law. The "De Gruyter Online" platform provides access to title information and the electronic content for De Gruyter journals and books under one roof. Users from the MPG have access to following products: * De Gruyter Journals and Yearbooks - current content of selected serial titles available on the platform (last 13 volumes) * De Gruyter Journal Archive - backfile content of 150 titles * De Gruyter Online / Research Now E-Journal Archive - about 50 journals focusing on research in economics, formerly published by Berkeley Electronic Press until 2022 * De Gruyter eBooks - a collection of purchased e-books which is continuously extended by single e-book acquisitions by MPG libraries