In 2019, Springer Nature partnered with The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) and its sister organisation UKB, to jointly explore and answer the question “Is open research facilitating progress on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)”? In this interview, we talk to Timon Oeflein on our Account Development team, about the background and findings of this partnership, and his role in facilitating it. 

March 2020 | The whole world is in the grip of an unprecedented crisis impacting the way we go about our daily lives. For the time being, universities and schools are switching to online learning, and professionals around the world are working from home whilst juggling child care and other responsibilities. As a global company, we at Springer Nature are incredibly used to remote working; however, this changes a lot for us as well.

This article was amended on 23rd July, 2020 In March 2020, Springer Nature launched a global program to support learning and teaching at higher education institutions worldwide.  As one of our efforts to support lecturers, teachers, students and librarians during these challenging times we provided free access to more than 500 key textbooks across our eBook subject collections, to help ease the sudden change to remote learning and working. This access ran to align with most school years, expiring on July 31, 2020. We have been overwhelmed with the usage of these titles and hope that the free access has proven helpful for you. We understand that the challenges will continue in the new academic year and hope that you and your colleagues have been able to plan for restarting the year in a new way. We are happy to partner with you on any content access challenges you may have, so please do reach out to us.  Springer Nature will continue to support the global response to COVID-19 by enabling fast and direct access to the latest available research, evidence, and data relevant to the pandemic. More information on our full program can be found at springernature.com/gp/researchers/campaigns/coronavirus So far we have made over 19,000 pieces of research from our journals and books available for free and will continue to do so as new relevant research is published.  We hope you continue to stay safe and healthy.   Free textbook title listsFree Emergency Nursing titles (German)Free English textbook titles (all disciplines)Free German textbook titles (all disciplines) For a complete list of MARC Records for all of these titles, clicks the link below and just "tick" either MARC21, MARCXML, or Excel in the format section. Free English textbook titles MARC RecordsFree German textbook titles MARC Records  ++ Read the original press release here++

In the past decade, eBook collections have become more common place, publishing technologies have improved.