Your research relating to the Sustainable Development Goals contributes to academic knowledge that can impact the important work of policymakers, practitioners, and communities working to address urgent global challenges. In this post, we discuss how publishing your research as an article or as part of a collection at Springer Nature can give your work extended reach and impact. We also include a checklist to support you in getting started.   

Publishing your work as a journal article or in a journal collection makes it available to a broad audience of academics, practitioners, and policymakers. For research relating to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), delivering timely, focused, and credible insights can contribute to shaping SDG policy. 

The article format: Why it works so well for SDG research 

The concise structure of an article gives the content clarity that allows policymakers, nongovernmental organisations, and researchers to understand and apply your findings. Journal articles are published and indexed rapidly, making their knowledge and insights discoverable and available.  

Those who work practically on evolving issues like climate resilience, poverty alleviation, gender equality, or sustainable cities, can get support from this knowledge and stay responsive. The peer review process that articles undergo lend the research rigour and authority that are important to influence decisions and shape interventions.  

And when your work is published with a publisher that actively supports and champions the SDGs, its reach and relevance become even more meaningful. Springer Nature is committed to amplifying SDG articles’ visibility, strengthening its credibility, and ensuring it contributes to the broader global effort toward a more sustainable and equitable future. 

Why publish your SDG research in a Springer Nature journal or collection? 

Springer Nature is committed to supporting SDG-related research and amplifying it across disciplines and sectors. We offer one of the world’s broadest portfolios for SDG-related research, spanning thousands of journals and specialist collections. Through the Springer Nature SDG Programme, we support SDG-related research and amplify it across disciplines and sectors.  

With more than one million SDG relevant articles and chapters published since the SDGs were introduced in 2015, and over 17 million citations for its SDG content, Springer Nature journals and collections offer a home for high quality research designed to create real world impact. Your work gains visibility among global research communities as well as the policymakers and practitioners who rely on evidence to drive the Goals forward. 

[pull out quote] Springer Nature data show that publishing in collections leads to 31% more citations, 30% more downloads, and 63% higher Altmetrics scores than articles published outside of a collection. 

Making impact with your SDG research, in academia and policy 

A special report from 2025, titled ‘From publication to policy,’ examined the influence of published research on policies linked to the SDGs, as a signal of real-world impact on internationally agreed priorities. It showed that SDG research is not only growing in volume but also demonstrates higher academic impact.

SDG articles received higher average citations, Altmetric scores (indicating attention), and full-text downloads than non-SDG articles. But for the SDGs, impact beyond academia is central. The report shows that academic research is cited in SDG-related policy more often than in wider policy. Research is being used in policy and practice to support evidence, justify recommendations, or shape policy directions.  

“Our report shows that SDG research is being used well beyond academia, actively informing policy and real‑world decision‑making.” 
Nicola Jones, Director, Springer Nature SDG Programme 

For maximum reach for your SDG research, publish open access  

The report also explored the influence of different publishing models, and found that publishing open access significantly enhances the societal impact of SDG-aligned research. By removing barriers to readership, your work becomes instantly accessible to policymakers, educators, nongovernmental organisations, and communities.  

Springer Nature supports the broadest possible dissemination of research central to sustainable development. Much of the SDG-related research published in Springer Nature is openly available for anyone to read. In 2025, 62% of Springer Nature’s SDG-related articles were published open access.  

How publishing in a collection can amplify your SDG research  

A collection is a curated group of journal articles that focus on a specific theme or emerging topic, sometimes also known as a special issue. Springer Nature collections create a dynamic platform for authors working on similar research to share insights and discoveries. This affinity makes research more discoverable and relevant for related and interdisciplinary audiences. 

Many of these collections have an SDG-focus and engage with broad audiences that share an interest in the relevant SDGs. In 2025 alone, Springer Nature launched 2,180 SDG-related collections. 

Publishing in a collection is an effective way to increase the reach and relevance of your work, and to transform promising research into real-world impact. Curated by expert guest editors, SDG-focused collections bring together related research and make it easier for readers to discover and contextualise your article. The various Springer Nature collections that advance the SDGs highlight impactful research and attract readership. 

Just as importantly, publishing in a collection places your work within a carefully curated and trustworthy research environment, supported by expert editorial oversight and integrity safeguards that help uphold the quality, credibility, and relevance of the research it contains. That focus on quality is also reflected in author feedback: last year, 87% of authors were happy with their collections publishing experience. 

“Publishing in a collection has given this research much greater visibility, specifically because it showcases the real-world application in Malawi. This has acted as a powerful proof of concept. [...] Collections offer an excellent opportunity to ensure one’s research contributes directly to a specific, impactful conversation, reaching the very people who can act on it. It’s about getting the work in front of the right audience, not just the biggest one.” 
Megha Rao, Research Fellow for the Thanzi Labwino (Better Health) project 

Checklist: How to get started and publish your SDG article  

• Identify which SDG(s) your work addresses.  

1. Use Springer Nature’s SDG Programme page and its hubs dedicated to each of the SDGs to explore and identify topics.  

• Select journals or collections aligned with your discipline and SDG topic. 

1. Explore with the Journal Finder and consider SDG badges on journals that support the SDGs. 
2. On Springer Nature Link, use the SDG filter to refine your search and identify journals or calls for papers for relevant collections. 

• Review the aims, scope, editorial policies, and submission requirements of relevant journals. 

1. Check the collections and updates pages of journals of interest to explore calls for papers open to submissions.  
2. If you can’t find a call for papers relevant to your work, consider proposing an SDG-related collection to the journal’s editor-in-chief.  

• Consider publishing open access to expand the visibility, reach, and policy engagement of your work.  

1. Learn more about open access journals, and explore the glossary of terms to help you navigate the world of open access science. 
2. Find out about funding availability for publishing open access.  

• Highlight the SDG relevance of your article.  

1. Alongside the usual priorities when preparing your manuscript, such as clarity and methodological rigour, make the connection to the relevant SDG(s) explicit, and where appropriate include policy analyses and practical recommendations. 

• Extend visibility post publication.  

1. After publishing in a Springer Nature journal or collection, consider writing a ‘Behind the Paper’ post on Springer Nature’s Research Communities. This special glimpse behind the research is tagged with relevant SDGs on the Research Communities, further amplifying the reach of your work and the potential for building new connections.  

Springer Nature is committed to advancing progress on the SDGs by publishing high quality, impactful research and ensuring it reaches the audiences who can use it to drive change. Publish your SDG research in a Springer Nature journal or collection to support these efforts, and get our support to making your research count.  

Learn more about publishing in a Springer Nature journal or collection, including a step-by-step guide to walk you through the publication journey and information on open access publishing.  

Related content:

• Can open access help SDG research achieve greater impact?
• Can open access help SDG research achieve greater impact?
• Unlocking Research Impact: What Is a Springer Nature Collection? 
• How SDG research drives policy: A special report 
• What can institutions learn from a systems approach to sustainability transformation? 

Don't miss the latest news and blogs, sign up to The Researcher's Source Monthly Digest! 

This Global Accessibility Awareness Day, UX Researcher and Generation Valuable mentee Gonzalo Gonzales shares his experience of the Valuable 500 initiative and the importance of small details when it comes to inclusion.

In December 2025, 500 organisations came together in Tokyo for the world’s first accountability summit on disability inclusion in business: SYNC25. As a mentee in Springer Nature’s Generation Valuable programme, I attended to share experiences with peers from across the Valuable 500: a global partnership that brings together companies to support disability inclusion. Generation Valuable is its reciprocal mentoring programme, pairing senior executives with disabled leaders.

Safety makes disclosure possible

My disclosure came a few months into my journey at Springer Nature. I had only received my diagnosis not long before joining, so I was still learning how to talk about it. I was also learning how to accept myself with this new part of me. The only reason I could be open that early was that the environment felt safe, and my manager was supportive.

Disability inclusion, by design

At the event, leaders spoke about disability inclusion as a strategy, by design, and about inclusion as something that shapes innovation and builds engagement. I went to SYNC25 to learn from different disabled and neurodivergent perspectives and share my experience as a neurodivergent mentee. I spoke about how my mentor at SN, Marc Spenlé, COO, helped me shape how I try to lead by putting authenticity at the centre of our relationship.

For me, mentorship is not magic. It is built on trust, listening, and clear objectives. It is also built around safety, which matters a lot to me as an autistic person.

From mentee to microphone

The day before I spoke at SYNC25, I barely enjoyed the beauty of Tokyo. I was too nervous about speaking in front of strangers on a very large, unfamiliar stage. My mentor, Marc, gave me three reminders that shaped my entire participation:

Be yourself.
Treat it as a learning experience.
Have fun, enjoy what you’re doing.

This advice fit our mentorship perfectly. Our relationship revolves around authenticity, mutual learning, and enjoying what we were experiencing. So, I used it. I scrawled my quite structured notes into a little notepad and got to the stage.

I shared part of my life story as a neurodivergent immigrant. For a long time, I assumed I felt “different” mainly because of cultural differences, but not completely; it was more undiagnosed autism and ADHD.

I also talked about how “be yourself” made me react defensively the first time I heard it during mentoring, as if it were easy. In my life, being myself often came with risk. I could be judged or excluded because of my social differences. So, like many neurodivergent people, I tend to mask to protect myself.

I still mask sometimes. I understand the cost, and I know not everyone understands neurodiversity. In contrast, I have started speaking up more, initiating conversations, and showing up as a whole person. I think it is easier to build safety when you build trust from the start.

Inclusion shows up in the small things

Networking is not fun for me. Being AuDHD (autism + ADHD), I crave connection, but I process social cues differently and I need more time to respond. Fast-paced situations can feel overwhelming.

But something small happened after my talk. People started approaching me. They shared personal stories, dinner, and their big projects for the future. I had never talked so casually with a CEO of a global firm before. I expected distance and formality. Instead, it was just a very human conversation.

He seemed genuinely moved by what I said, partly because he was the uncle of a young autistic child. He was kind, authentic, and open. That moment felt like a reflection of what I had just spoken about, and it mirrored the same safety, kindness, and respect I have been shown by my manager and my mentor.

Bringing it back to my day-to-day work

My day-to-day role is UX research in an educational digital product. I am not an accessibility specialist, and I am not an inclusion specialist. What I do understand much better now is how inclusion shows up in everyday work.

It shows up in who gets invited into conversations, whose perspectives carry more weight, and whether barriers are brushed aside as exceptions or treated as a sign that the way we do research is unintentionally excluding people.   

What I asked leaders to do

I closed my participation at SYNC25 by urging leaders not to be afraid to invest in disabled and neurodivergent talent. Disability is not a deficit. My disability has helped me shape how I lead in certain ways, but it is not my defining factor. I am a whole person. That is why I have recently taken on a mentoring role focused on neuroinclusion, to support leaders who want to reflect on how their interactions can include or exclude neurodivergent colleagues.

Treating people with respect, making accommodations ordinary tools for performance, and not excluding people unintentionally are the details that decide whether people feel safe enough to contribute fully.

One line I heard stayed with me: “Disclosure happens only when respect is guaranteed.” I have felt that respect from my manager and from so many of my colleagues at Springer Nature. It has shaped what I believe inclusion can look like, especially through mentorship, safety, and the details that help people thrive.

This is the third blog post in a new series in which researchers share their experiences with open science practices, and reflect on the impact that sharing open data, code, and protocols can have.   

Johannes Köster is Professor for Bioinformatics and Computational Oncology at the Institute for AI and Medicine, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. As author of the open-source workflow management system, Snakemake, and founder of the Bioconda project, Johannes Köster has extensive experience with open science practices and publishing, with Nature Portfolio articles including Applying the FAIR Principles to computational workflows (Scientific Data), Neoadjuvant nivolumab with or without relatlimab in resectable non-small-cell lung cancer: a randomized phase 2 trial (Nature Medicine), and Bioconda: sustainable and comprehensive software distribution for the life sciences (Nature Methods).  

We asked Professor Köster to share his perspective as an advocate of data sharing and embracing open science in every area of research practice.

How did you first become interested in open science practices?  

I think it was early during my PhD thesis when my group was approached by another that did research in reproducibility and workflow management. They asked, ‘How does this apply to Bioinformatics, actually?’ At that time, we were using a very old but relevant tool to ensure reproducibility of our data analysis. 

Upon this request, we sat together and drafted ideas on how we could make this more ergonomic and convenient for bioinformaticians, such as workflow management, reproducibility, and so on. This is, of course, only a part of open science, but it was the part that drove me to the topic. We brainstormed a bit; I came up with an idea for a syntax and the others did too. I then kind of converged those three ideas into a prototype. That was Snakemake. 

I implemented that over a couple of days and refined it for about one year. Suddenly, it was so useful for the entire group. When we published it, it was immediately very useful for many others. This became quite important for my thesis. In principle, this is exactly what brought me to open science: reproducibility and thinking, ‘How can we actually make our data analysis more accessible to others?’ It’s not only about automation but about making this accessible and understandable. That is, for me, what open science is or should be about. 

What open science practices do you use? 

Whatever I'm involved in, I ensure we publish all the code and data whenever possible. With data, it sometimes depends. When we can, we rely entirely on open data that is also accessible to everybody. Sometimes, like for example in the Nature Medicine paper we published last year, it's not possible because it's German patient data and we are not allowed to just disclose it for everybody, but at least it's uploaded to a repository where you can ask for access. It's a bit more cumbersome than just hitting a button and automatically downloading everything, but this is the best we can do in such a case.  

Protocols are, for me, inside the code. We try to write code in a way that’s human readable, not just dumping some stuff that we run quickly for publication but making sure that it's also reusable and readable by others. This is, I think, an important aspect that is often not fully recognised by reviewers or journal editors. It’s nice that journals sometimes try to get people to publish those things along with the paper, which is already an improvement compared to before, but the quality of what is published matters as well, I think. For me, this is particularly important and a mission. 

What motivated you to adopt these practices?  

“It’s very important that code is seen as a primary research output.” 

  Johannes Köster, Institute for AI and Medicine, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany 

I think the true value, especially of the stuff that comes as auxiliary to the actual manuscript, lies in two things. First of all, I hope that it makes it easier for readers and reviewers to judge whether the work was valid, both from a methods perspective and a statistical perspective. Doing a data analysis is much more than what you usually read in the methods section of a manuscript, like ‘we applied a t-test’ [a statistical test that compares the means of two samples]. Often, it’s not even specified whether it was one-sided or two-sided, or what the exact thresholds were. For a t-test it’s easy, but there are much more complex methods, and all the parameters matter — how you filter the data matters, and so on. That level of detail you only see in the code. Therefore, I think it’s very important that code is seen as a primary research output. 

The other aspect is not about transparency or judgement, but I think people are reinventing the wheel all the time. Not so much in methods papers but in papers that analyse some big dataset. All the code is rewritten constantly because it wasn’t done in a way where you can actually reuse it and apply it to new datasets. I think this is the second big value of this approach: ideally, each publication is made of building blocks that can be used by others as well, at least in part. This is what we should all aim for because then people can concentrate on the actual big questions and don’t have to deal with all these technical difficulties every time. 

Have you ever faced any particular challenges or barriers in undertaking open science practices?  

There are quite a few barriers or challenges. One I mentioned already, especially as somebody who wants to use open data analyses by others, which is people don't take enough care in publishing and documenting those parts properly. In part, I think this is a matter of culture on the principal investigator (PI) level because they don't care so much how their postdocs or PhD students publish those parts, as long as they can ‘tick the box’. 

Another is for open access. The pricing is not always reasonable. It might be justified, but it's causing discrepancies or imbalances between countries and research groups. There are groups that have a lot of funding, and for them it's much easier to publish high impact because they can easily afford it. Also, there are countries where it's much easier to afford than other countries. That causes science to be a hierarchical system. That's a bad side effect of open access, I think, because everybody wants to publish open access nowadays or most people. It means some people need to choose a journal by just the price, and that is not good. 

Is there a particular success story or example you’re proud of that illustrates the benefits of open science?  

For me, personally, it's definitely the story about Snakemake and Bioconda because they enabled a lot of things for me. First of all, having these tools available, being able to use them, and show others how to use them in unrelated publications made me quite well known in the community. This enabled a lot of career steps for me. For example, one year before the end of my PhD thesis, I was asked to be a postdoc in the lab of Shirley Liu in Harvard. I would never have thought of applying for a postdoc in Harvard if I had not been contacted by her. She only contacted me because she knew about my open science stuff, so that was a huge opener for me. Of course, by just having something you maintain for a long time, you get regular users and they tend to collaborate more with you. That opens a lot of doors. 

How do you advise early career researchers on open science best practices? 

“When thinking about the code you publish along with your open science, make sure you use quality control tools.” 

                                              Johannes Köster, Institute for AI and Medicine, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany 

When thinking about the code you publish along with your open science, make sure you use quality control tools. There are lots of them available for virtually every programming language. The benefit is, of course, that maintainability improves and you less frequently run into issues, such as having a shortfall in your analysis that you don’t see until publication. 

Speaking about tooling, AI is also a tool one needs to mention. It can be very useful in terms of, let’s say, reviewing your code, but you have to be super careful with that. I would not use it in a generative way, especially not for science. You need to be very sure about every single method and parameter, and AI is not about being sure. What I’m really worried about is paper writing with AI. To me, writing a paper is the process of getting your research idea into a natural language. This process is part of the actual research because you need to think about everything again, and sometimes while doing that, you get new ideas or spot a mistake that you wouldn’t if you just prompted AI to write this paragraph for you. 

This process can be painful, of course, especially if you’re a beginner, but if we start to skip that, we will have a huge problem with the quality of research. It also applies to writing code, such as writing the analysis or engaging in the cognitive process of solving a problem in a scientific way. If you just delegate things like that to AI, we are lost, I think. With this I don’t want to say that AI is not a useful addition and assistance, but we should not let ourselves be seduced to use it as a shortcut. 

Are there any gaps in support or resources about open science you’d like to see addressed?  

Open science gives you a lot, but it's very hard to get recognition for that (apart from personal relationships or career steps) in terms of, let's say, metrics, for how successful you are as a researcher. In terms of software, even if it's a small, niche project, you ideally still need to maintain it for a very long time. This is often not recognised in academia. People look at citations and probably download counts, but even for niche projects, it can still be a huge benefit for the scientific community if the person who developed it maintains it for a long time. I think we need to find metrics we can have for that as well, like continuous maintenance and proper user support, and so on. 

Another gap relates to how we handle peer review. So far, reviews are a service that researchers do for others and for the journals, of course, because it wouldn't work if everybody just published and nobody reviewed. It makes total sense, but it also means that it's often anonymous and the review is not open science, although there are exceptions to that. I like this idea of the review being a publication in and of itself because that's also science, and this is something that deserves recognition. Why not make this as open as a research artefact and let others read the review? 

Currently, we think once the paper is published, the review process is over, and then we have just the authors and the readers. There's usually no direct feedback mechanism. That's something journals could think about adopting as well, allowing reviews by readers. A platform that already explores this direction is Octopus,where peer reviews get their own DOI, becoming a citable and public entity. 

What advice would you give to researchers considering adopting open science practices?  

“There's nothing better in training you as a scientist or a computer scientist than participating in open source and getting in contact with others.” 

            Johannes Köster, Institute for AI and Medicine, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany 

When I teach students, I tell them all the time, think about open-source projects you could contribute to or come up with your own. "There's nothing better in training you as a scientist or a computer scientist than participating in open source and getting in contact with others."  

Regarding taking care of open science and reproducibility in the publication process, I would say just do it, even if your PI doesn't care. They will tell you, ‘We have to publish this paper next Friday,’ and then, of course, every PhD student will think, ‘Oh, I just need to get this done.’ In the end, it goes into review, but the reviewers want some additional work to be done or criticise a certain step of the analysis. Now they need to go back to the work they did in a rush and basically repeat it because they didn’t do it in a properly documented and automated way the first time. 

What I want to say is that it usually pays off if you spend this extra time thinking about being reproducible and open, in the sense that later on you have less work to do and can build upon your previous work. By doing that, you get automatic citations because if others use your code for their analysis, they have to cite you. I can definitely see from my own practices that it nearly always pays off in the end. 

Learn more about open science and sharing research data, code and protocols & methods openly 

Johannes Köster, PhD, Professor for Bioinformatics and Computational Oncology at the Institute for AI in Medicine, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Johannes Köster is professor for Bioinformatics and Computational Oncology at the Institute for AI in Medicine, University of Duisburg-Essen, with a focus on algorithm engineering and data analysis. Johannes Köster studied computer science at the University of Dortmund, did his PhD at the TU Dortmund, and was a postdoc at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard University and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI). 

 Johannes Köster is the author of the workflow management system Snakemake and the founder of the Bioconda project for sustainably distributing bioinformatics software as easily installable packages. He is also the author of the Rust-Bio library, and works in the field of Bayesian statistics in order to provide algorithms for analysis of high-throughput data while capturing and quantifying all known sources of uncertainty, thereby providing more reproducible predictions.

Related content:

• Open science conversations: 

1. Building trust through transparency: An open science conversation with Geir Kjetil Sandve 
2. Open science, altruism and impact: An interview with clinical geneticist Zornitza Stark

•  Best practices for transparency and reuse: 

1. How to share your research protocols and methods openly 

2. How to share your research code openly 

• Supporting open science practices: 

1. Why share your research data? 

2. Why sharing protocols matters 

3. Why sharing your code matters 

• Starting your career? Here’s how Springer can help you publish open access 

Don't miss the latest news and blogs, sign up to The Researcher's Source Monthly Digest! 

Peer review is a defining part of publishing: a chance to have your work stress tested by experts and strengthened before it reaches the wider community. After months of developing your paper and choosing a journal with care, that review period can feel like a pause, but it’s also where valuable, field-specific feedback can help move your research forward. Read on to hear how other researchers found the peer review process at Discover, so you know what to expect.

For many early career researchers (ECRs), the phrase “rigorous peer review” is meant to signal quality, and when the process is clear and constructive, it can do exactly that. But it’s not always easy to know what to expect: who will review your work, what kind of feedback will you receive, and how will the timeline unfold. The best experiences pair high standards with practical, actionable guidance and transparent communication, so you can improve your manuscript with confidence and keep moving.

Discover journals are built on a different premise: peer review should be a positive and constructive experience that significantly bolsters your research and professional growth. As part of Springer Nature's portfolio of over 600 fully open access (OA) journals, the 70+ Discover titles were created to improve how peer review works for authors, ensuring academic rigour and a supportive environment define our authors’ experience.   

What does rigour mean at Discover?

We address traditional publishing barriers such as opaque timelines and prestige bias by redefining rigour as follows: 

• Subject-specific expertise: we aim to find reviewers as closely matched as possible to your specialism, ensuring you get useful feedback 
• Actionable guidance: we routinely ask reviewers to provide feedback is structured to give authors clear, practical steps for improvement 
• Transparency: you can track your manuscript from submission through to decision, with real-time updates available in your author dashboard 
• Support: you will benefit from Springer Nature's established publishing systems, which ensure your work meets global ethical standards, receives expert editorial oversight, and is indexed upon publication. 

Rigour is one of four commitments, alongside representation, rapid publication, and wide-reaching impact, which ensure we provide an efficient path to publication for diverse researchers.

Want to hear what this looks like in practice? Watch the video below where our authors share real experiences of constructive, confidence-building peer review.

The Discover author experience

Our commitment to rigour is best reflected by the researchers around the world who have published with us. Here is how they describe their experience with us: 

Dr. Sara Causevic, a postdoctoral fellow at Stockholm University, published research in Discover Conservation on the use of AI and earth observation to protect forests. She describes the peer review process as rigorous but purposeful.

“The peer process was rigorous, but it was also very constructive. It pushed us to strengthen different sections of our paper, which were critical to ensure that our paper was still original and novel. Communication from the editorial team was clear throughout, and the paper moved from submission to publication in three to four months.” 

― Sara Causevic, Discover Conservation 

Constructive feedback, delivered on time

Rigorous feedback is essential, but it lands much better within a transparent and supportive environment. Enoch Leung, a researcher in inclusive education at McGill University, Canada, describes what sets Discover Education apart. For Enoch, the value wasn’t just in the speed, but in the tone of the exchange.

“We felt like we were all contributing to the success of our article, really incorporating the feedback and elevating the manuscript to the next level.” 

― Enoch Leung, Discover Education 

For Vicky Xu, a research associate at the University of Sydney, Australia, Discover Psychology’s visual timeline was central to making the review process less intimidating.  

Relevant feedback, professional standards 

Dr. Nasrin Sultana, of Hajee Mohammad Danesh Science and Technology University, Bangladesh, needed a journal that offered relevant, high-quality review. After previous experiences where feedback felt disconnected from her research, she was pleased to find the Discover Electronics review committee came back with the specificity she was looking for. She adds, “Their comments were actually related to the work; it really helped me to improve the quality of my paper.” 

While Dr Sultana found the exact guidance she needed, Paul Awoyera, an associate professor at Prince Mohammed bin Fahd University, Saudi Arabia, also had a positive experience with the Discover Sustainability team. He described it as professional and efficient, and the work as “a collaborative experience rather than just a transactional one.” 

Good is good enough: why you shouldn’t wait for perfection

The researchers featured here share a consistent message for ECRs approaching peer review for the first time: do not avoid it. 

Sara Causevic is direct: peer review can sound harsh, but she advises embracing it regardless. Some of the greatest improvements to her paper came directly from reviewer feedback. “Don't fear the peer review process. Embrace it. It will improve your paper — and don't take it personally.” 

Enoch Leung notes that waiting to produce a perfect manuscript will mean missing the opportunity for a critical external assessment. He thinks that feedback is part of the process, not a verdict on it. Atique Ishrak Anik, at Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology, Bangladesh, gives the best advice for anyone who might be feeling unsure about submitting: “peer review is not a criticism. It is a way to improve your work.”

Evaluating a journal: what to look for

Peer review is difficult to evaluate from the outside. When choosing a journal, ask: 

• Are reviewers matched precisely to your specialism? 
• Is feedback structured and actionable, or just generic? 
• Does the editorial team communicate clearly throughout the process, with defined timelines? 

Every Discover title strives to ensure the answer to each of these questions is a definitive yes. Qualified reviewers, constructive feedback, and transparent communication are how we operate. 

You’ve done the hard work. Rigorous peer review ensures that your good work is scrutinised by experts, improved by specific feedback, and supported by a process that keeps you informed throughout. 

That is the experience the researchers featured here had with Discover journals. And it is exactly what the series was designed to provide. This year also marks a milestone for the series: Discover Psychology, Discover Education, and Discover Sustainability, among several others, are turning five—and the stories shared above by authors from these title shows how we’re actively bringing that author experience to life across the series. 

If you want rigorous review without the guesswork, explore the Discover journal series, where defined timelines and clear editorial communication are part of the process. 

Featured research 

• Sara Causevic, Discover Conservation  
  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44353-024-00002-2

• Enoch Leung, Discover Education  
  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-022-00016-9 

• Nasrin Sultana, Discover Electronics 
  DOI: https://10.1007/s44291-024-00002-5 

• Vicky Xu, Discover Psychology  
  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-023-00111-4 

• Paul Awoyera, Discover Sustainability  
  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-024-00655-y 

• Atique Ishrak Anik, Discover Civil Engineering  
  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44290-024-00018-6

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• How authors found the right fit with Discover: a publishing home for every researcher 
• Discover journals: Open access funding options for our authors  
• Case study: How one collection led to real-world policy impact and academic recognition 
• The value of null results: How Discover champions inclusive science 
• Why Discover journals are an ideal outlet for SDG-focused research 
• Infographic | The benefits of publishing null results 
• More than just a number: How new impact factors help Discover authors 
• Discover collections: An effective approach for enhancing article impact 
• Responsive, inclusive, and reactive: Going behind the scenes at Discover 
• Inclusive, Global and Interdisciplinary: Discover journals break with tradition 
• Discover: A portfolio of inclusive, open access journals

Publishing open access (OA) means your research is immediately available to anyone, anywhere, without subscription barriers. If you’re considering Scientific Reports, you might be wondering: how do researchers cover the article processing charge (APC)? The good news is that funding is often available, you just need to know where to look. This guide walks you through the most common options, so you can plan early and publish with confidence.

Scientific Reports is fully open access, by design

Scientific Reports is part of the Nature Portfolio and is built to be a trusted, rigorous home for scientifically sound research from across disciplines—open and accessible to the global research community. As a fully OA journal, every article is published open access as soon as it’s ready, supporting broad discoverability and access across institutions, sectors, and regions. 

That means you don’t need to decide whether to publish OA in Scientific Reports, OA is built in. What you do need is a clear plan for funding the APC. 

Quick clarity: the APC, the timing, and why “early” matters

Scientific Reports charges an APC, which is determined from the date your article is accepted. You can find the current APC (plus any applicable VAT/ local taxes), along with helpful resources, on Scientific Reports dedicated Open Access Fees and Funding page. 

Because funding routes can depend on eligibility checks, institutional approvals, or grant conditions, it’s worth exploring your options before submission (or at least early in the process), so there are no surprises later.

Your OA funding routes: the most common options

Most authors cover APCs through one (or a combination) of these routes: 

1. Institutional open access agreements (often the easiest route) 
2. Funder or grant support 
3. Institutional OA funds (via your library or research office) 
4. Waivers or discounts (when available) 
5. Self-funding (as a last resort, or when required) 

Let’s unpack each one.

Route 1 (start here): Institutional open access agreements

Many universities and institutions have open access agreements with Springer Nature that can cover APCs fully or partially for eligible authors and eligible journals. 

Depending on your institution’s agreement, this support may look like: 

• Full APC coverage (your institution pays 100%) 
• A percentage discount (e.g., a fixed % off the list price) 
• A fixed contribution (e.g., up to a set amount) 

These agreements are designed to reduce both the financial and administrative burden, and they’re usually integrated into the publishing workflow for the corresponding author. 

Tip: Even if you’ve never used OA funding before, you may already be covered, especially if your institution has a library-led OA team or participates in national/consortium arrangements.

If you’re in the US

The US landscape is mixed. Policies, OA budgets, and institutional approaches vary widely. That’s exactly why OA agreements can be such a helpful first check: if your university participates, an agreement can remove much of the friction (and uncertainty) around APC payment.

Route 2: Your research funder or grant provider

Many funders allow APCs as eligible costs, either within an existing grant budget or through a dedicated OA publishing allowance. 

What to check: 

• Is OA publishing an allowable cost for your grant? 
• Are there rules about the licence type (e.g., CC BY)? 
• Do you need to acknowledge funding in a specific way? 
• Does your funder require immediate OA (which Scientific Reports already provides)? 

If you’re unsure, your institution’s grants office or library OA team can often confirm the best route quickly.

Route 3: Your library’s OA fund (or local institutional support)

Even if you’re not covered by an OA agreement, your institution may have: 

• a central OA fund 
• a departmental publishing budget 
• support for early-career researchers 
• guidance on applying for institutional or charitable publication funds 

Libraries are often the best starting point here. Many have dedicated OA specialists who can: 

• tell you what funding exists locally 
• explain eligibility rules 
• help you avoid delays later in the process 

Route 4: Waivers and discounts (when available) 

Springer Nature offers APC waivers and discounts for articles in fully open access journals in certain circumstances. 

Two key points to know up front: 

1. Some waivers/discounts apply automatically (for example, based on the corresponding author’s location in the world’s lowest income countries). 
2. Other waiver/discount requests are assessed case-by-case, and typically need to be requested at the point of manuscript submission (not during review, and not after acceptance). 

If you think you may need a waiver or discount, plan for this early so you can apply at the right moment in the workflow.

Route 5: Self-funding (when other routes aren’t available) 

Sometimes researchers pay APCs directly, especially when: 

• there’s no agreement coverage 
• the grant doesn’t allow publication costs 
• local institutional funds are unavailable 
• a time-sensitive publication decision needs a fast route 

If this is your situation, it can still help to speak to your library or department first. They may be able to suggest partial support, discounts, or alternative internal funding streams. 

Find your best route in 60 seconds: a simple checklist 

If you do nothing else, do this: 

1. Check whether your institution has a Springer Nature OA agreement (and whether Scientific Reports is included). 
2. Confirm you’re the corresponding author (agreement eligibility typically runs through the corresponding author). 
3. Check your affiliations (if you have multiple, test the most relevant ones). 
4. Check your funder rules (especially licence/compliance requirements). 
5. If needed, talk to your library/OA office early (they can often resolve uncertainties fast). 

A few FAQs researchers often ask 

“What if I have multiple affiliations, or international co-authors?” 

Funding eligibility is commonly tied to the corresponding author’s affiliation and the institution’s agreement terms. If you have multiple affiliations, it can be worth checking each one and confirming which affiliation should be used for funding purposes. 

“Does funding affect peer review?” 

No. Funding checks and APC payment processes are separate from editorial decisions and peer review. 

“What if I realise too late that I needed a waiver?” 

Because waiver/discount requests typically need to be made at the point of submission, it’s worth flagging financial constraints early—before your manuscript progresses. 

Publishing OA shouldn’t be the barrier 

Open access is about making scientifically sound research available to the widest possible community, globally and immediately. And in many cases, the funding is already there. 

If you’re considering Scientific Reports, take a few minutes to explore the routes above. A quick check now can remove delays later and help you focus on what matters most: sharing your work. 

Next step: Start by checking your institutional OA agreement eligibility, and if you’re unsure, contact your library or OA office for guidance. 

Check your eligibility in minutes. Head to the Scientific Reports website to explore funding options, agreements, and next steps for submitting your research.

Related content:

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• What does it mean to be part of Nature Portfolio? We ask Scientific Reports authors
• How Scientific Reports supports research careers
• Scientific Reports: Your hub for global discovery
• Scientific Reports: At the Helm of Arctic Climate Research 
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• Starting your career? Here’s how Springer can help you publish open access
• The story of Springer’s first open access book
• Advancing knowledge: How open access is changing research

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Connecting research to real‑world policy outcomes is becoming a strategic priority for institutions that support and disseminate scholarly knowledge. Institutions are increasingly expected to demonstrate how the research they fund, publish, or manage contributes to national and global priorities, including the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet much of that impact depends on what happens after research is produced: how easily it can be found, interpreted, and applied by policy actors.

In The publication‑to‑policy connection: Supporting the real‑world impact of research, we explored how evidence moves through policy ecosystems, highlighting the critical role played by intermediary organisations in translating research into use. More recently, What can institutions learn from a systems approach to sustainability transformation? examined how integrated data, collaboration, and aligned financing are needed to move beyond policy influence towards coordinated SDG action.

Our 2025 SDG Impact Report identified one key group that consistently sits at the centre of this translation process: think tanks. These organisations are among the most active users of scholarly literature in the policy ecosystem, synthesising research into insights that governments and international agencies rely on. Understanding how they work, and what they need from research, provides institutions with a powerful lens on how to boost visibility, usability, and policy influence.

This case study follows that process in practice through the work of a leading think tank, adelphi, showing how evidence moves from research to policy and what institutions can do to ensure their research is policy‑ready and positioned for maximum real‑world SDG impact.

How the SDGs shape policy priorities and funding

André Müller is Senior Advisor in Water and Biodiversity at adelphi, a German think tank and public policy consultancy focused on climate, environment, and development.

For André, “the SDGs are the overarching framework for almost everything we do in development cooperation.” This framework also shapes how national priorities are set and funded: “Since the SDGs are the overarching framework guiding Official Development Assistance (ODA), government aid that promotes the economic development and welfare of developing countries, the topics represented in them are those that receive funding and are mainstreamed into national policies,” he explains.

His work focuses on sustainable water management, freshwater ecosystem conservation, and climate adaptation, often in transboundary governance projects. “SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation) is definitely the most central to my work, but because water is such a cross-cutting issue, I often deal with other SDGs too, especially those related to biodiversity (SDG 15: Life on Land) and climate (SDG 13: Climate Action). Our work frequently analyses how solutions can deliver co-benefits across several sectors, SDGs, and other global policy frameworks.”

How think tanks use research every day

Our 2025 report found that think tanks, international organisations, and NGOs are the policy actors most likely to cite scholarly research. They also produce and publish their own studies, synthesising evidence into policy recommendations that are frequently cited by other types of policymakers. This points to a distinct role for these organisations as knowledge brokers, translating research in ways that can influence policymaking across multiple arenas.

For André, this science-to-policy-practice is simply part of the job: “This process is really our everyday business,” he explains. “We use primary research, synthesise the results, and communicate them to different audiences in ways that suit their needs, this might mean simplifying the language, focusing on specific findings, or turning research into actionable recommendations.”

Research underpins almost every aspect of his work. “I use research every day, my job wouldn’t be possible without it. I write studies, policy papers, and briefs, and we develop technical assessments for the state of rivers or wetlands, as well as management plans for river basins or give trainings on financing wetland protection.”

For research institutions, this has important implications: how research is accessed, discovered, and presented can directly shape its ability to inform policy. “All these activities depend on solid evidence and research,” explains André. “I also conduct research myself, generating new knowledge as a social scientist, for example, through expert interviews or focus groups. This applied research is always closely linked to practical challenges in the field.”

This intermediary role is particularly visible in Germany, where Ministries typically fund implementing agencies, which then contract think tanks and NGOs to deliver evidence-based inputs: “These agencies rarely deliver projects directly,” says André; “They contract think tanks like adelphi, or other organisations, to write policy briefs, develop strategies, or deliver capacity-building trainings.”

How evidence moves from research to policy

A recent example is a project André led for Germany’s main development agency, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, in preparation for the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP 15) in Montreal and the United Nations 2023 Water Conference in New York, focused on strengthening the role of freshwater ecosystems in German development cooperation.

“We developed four factsheets, each focused-on SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation) and its subgoals related to freshwater ecosystems, demonstrating links to other SDGs. We analysed biophysical connections, policy links, and co-benefits, and provided recommendations for strengthening these ties. We also produced a comprehensive policy paper exploring how German development actors can lead global efforts to better protect and restore freshwater ecosystems.”

Rather than producing new academic research alone, the emphasis was on translation, integration, and timing, ensuring that evidence entered policy discussions at moments when it could shape agendas. Thanks to sustained efforts like these, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework now includes explicit goals and indicators for freshwater ecosystems previously underrepresented in global biodiversity frameworks.

Why timing matters in policy influence

The SDGs have become a powerful lens for understanding and addressing society’s most urgent challenges, including access to clean water. While these issues were active areas of research long before the SDGs were introduced in 2015, André’s experience is that the Goals have helped align evidence, funding, and policy priorities.

“NGOs and think tanks have worked hard to build the evidence base needed to raise the profile of freshwater ecosystems in these policies and their associated indicators.”

This alignment increases the demand for timely access to credible, interdisciplinary research across multiple SDGs and subject areas, particularly in the context of global cuts to development budgets: “It’s more important than ever to implement solutions that pay off for multiple SDGs. Nature-based solutions are a great example here: restoring peatlands supports biodiversity, maintains healthy water cycles, helps with drought resilience, stores carbon, and benefits local livelihoods such as fishing and hunting. There are many other freshwater-related solutions with win-wins for multiple SDGs.”

Why research impact in policy is difficult to measure

Despite the emphasis on evidence-based policymaking, André is candid about how difficult impact can be in practice: “There’s a lot of discussion and activity around policymaking, but from my experience, actually influencing policy through research is quite challenging. If you want your research to have a real impact on policy, it takes a lot of experience and a strong network to know how to make that happen.”

This raises important questions about how impact is tracked, and how it could be strengthened: “We should get better at tracking whether our work actually makes a difference, and at improving our strategies for making that impact happen.”

For institutions, this highlights that impact is not only about availability, but about usability and reach across different audiences. This echoes the UN’s call for science to contribute to sustainable development through action, not just theory. The UNESCO’s 2016 Science for Sustainable Development policy brief emphasised closer alignment between science and policy through partnerships across government, business, and civil society.

Where institutions can strengthen research-to-policy pathways

Our report identifies several ways that institutions can strengthen this research-to-policy pathway by supporting think tanks in their intermediary role:

Institutional repositories should consider:

• Improving the accessibility of research through open access, making it easier for think tanks to engage with evidence, particularly in fast-moving policy contexts
• Using SDG-aligned tagging, metadata, and thematic curation to help surface relevant research more effectively

Librarians and knowledge managers can support think tanks by:

• Supporting research synthesis and review content, which is disproportionately cited in policy
• Helping users navigate bodies of evidence that cut across disciplines and SDGs

Research offices and funders can improve policy relevance by:

• Supporting outputs that are usable beyond academia, including synthesis and applied research
• Encouraging research that is closely linked to practical challenges in the field

Across all institutions, creating opportunities for closer dialogue between researchers, think tanks, and policymakers is essential, for example through institutional partnerships, events, and programmes such as Science for a Sustainable Future.

What’s next for research impact in policy?

As the 2030 target for the Sustainable Development Goals approaches, the need for evidence-informed policymaking will only intensify. Governments, funders, and international organisations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate progress, making the effective use of research more important than ever.

This case study highlights how that process works in practice. Research does not move directly from publication to policy. Instead, it is interpreted, synthesised, and applied by intermediary organisations such as think tanks, which play a critical role in shaping how evidence is used in decision-making.

Think tanks will continue to play a central role in this ecosystem, but they cannot operate in isolation. Stronger collaboration between research institutions, think tanks, and policymakers will be essential to ensure that evidence is not only produced, but actively used to shape decisions.

For institutions, this highlights the importance of moving beyond access alone to ensure research is positioned, discovered, and applied to strengthen its contribution to evidence-informed SDG policy. Explore the full findings in our SDG Impact Report: From publications to policy.

About André Müller

André Müller works as a Senior Advisor at adelphi, specialising in sustainable water resources management and biodiversity conservation. He sees an urgent need to drastically lower the growing pressures from human actions and a warming climate on water resources and the ecosystems that provide them. Thus, he dedicates his work to projects that spearhead a sustainable, climate-resilient water management approach.

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• Publishing SDG research: Initiatives that support your institution’s efforts

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Publishing your research is only part of the story. What matters just as much is who finds it, and whether they engage with it. Real impact comes from reaching the right readers: those who will apply your findings, cite your work, and build on your research.

Read on to learn how Springer Nature collections help make sure your research doesn’t just get seen but reaches communities actively looking for work like yours. That’s where meaningful engagement, and long-term impact, begins.

Why engaged readers matter

It’s not just about how many people see your research, it’s about who engages with it and how.

There’s a clear difference between: 

• Reach: being visible to a broad audience 
• Meaningful engagement: being read, cited, shared, and applied

When your work reaches the right audience, you’re more likely to see: 

• Higher citation potential from researchers working in your field 
• New collaborations across disciplines and institutions 
• Real-world impact, from influencing policy to shaping practice

For early-career researchers, this is especially critical. Building visibility among the right audiences helps establish your reputation, grow your network, and position your research within ongoing academic conversations. 

As highlighted in author stories, researchers who publish in collections often benefit from more targeted visibility and stronger downstream engagement like tangible interest from health ministries looking to put research into practice, WHO policy citations, and collaborative opportunities, because their work reaches readers already invested in the topic.

The challenge: reaching the right audience

Even high-quality research can struggle to find the right readers. 

That’s because: 

• Research is increasingly fragmented across disciplines and subfields 
• Publishing in a general context doesn’t guarantee targeted readership 
• Readers are looking for relevance, not volume 

You might publish strong work, but if it’s not positioned alongside related research, it risks being overlooked by the very audience most likely to use and cite it.

This is a common challenge highlighted across author case studies, for example, researchers working on global health and policy shared how context and placement were key to ensuring their work reached policymakers and practitioners, not just academics.

How Springer Nature collections drive engagement

Springer Nature collections are designed to help your research connect with engaged, relevant audiences. They do this by:

Curating research around specific topics

Your work is grouped with related articles, making it easier for readers to discover and explore connected research.

Reaching targeted research communities

Collections are promoted to audiences most likely to engage, helping your work reach readers actively interested in your field. 

Using audience insight and segmentation

Distribution is informed by reader behaviour and interests, increasing relevance and discoverability. 

Aligning with active research conversations

Editorial curation ensures your work sits within ongoing discussions, not in isolation.

In practice, this means your research is more discoverable, more contextualised, and more likely to be used. 

As explored in “Inside the author experience: what collection authors say and what to expect,” authors consistently highlight improved visibility and audience alignment as key benefits of publishing in a collection.

Want to see how you can get your work in front of the right readers? This short video shows how collections help connect your research with engaged audiences.

What engaged readership looks like in practice

Engaged readership isn’t just a metric, it’s reflected in how your research is used. 

For example:

• Researchers publishing on global challenges have seen their work reach policymakers and inform decision-making 
• Early-career authors report greater confidence in their visibility when publishing within a collection 
• Authors working in interdisciplinary areas benefit from cross-field discovery, connecting with audiences they might not otherwise reach

In one featured case, research on malaria control reached policy audiences more effectively thanks to targeted placement within a relevant collection, helping bridge the gap between research and real-world application. 

These examples show that when your research reaches the right audience, its impact extends far beyond publication.

How you can increase engagement (author tips)

If you want your research to connect with the right readers, there are practical steps you can take, before and after publication. 

Choose the right collection

Publishing in a collection aligned with your topic helps ensure your work sits alongside relevant research and reaches the right audience from the outset.

Write for discoverability

Use clear, accessible titles and abstracts that reflect how readers search for content. Avoid overly complex phrasing, clarity improves both search visibility and reader engagement.

Focus on why your research matters

Make it easy for readers to understand the significance of your work. Highlight the problem you’re addressing and its real-world relevance. 

Use consistent, relevant keywords 

Think about how your audience searches for content. Using consistent terminology improves indexing and helps your research surface in search and recommendation systems. 

Plan for post-publication visibility 

Consider how your research will be shared, through collections, networks, and broader promotion. Visibility doesn’t stop at publication. 

As many collection authors note, thinking about your audience early, rather than after publishing, can significantly increase engagement and impact. 

Focus on your audience early on 

If you want your research to do more than exist. If you want it to connect, influence, and resonate, you need to think beyond publication. Consider who will read it, how they’ll find it, and why it matters to them. 

Springer Nature collections are designed to support exactly that: helping your research reach the audiences who are most likely to engage with it and amplify its impact.

Explore the Springer Nature collections hub and find the right home for your research.

Related content:

• Inside the author experience: what collection authors say and what to expect 
• Safeguarding Springer Nature collections: the integrity checks you should know about 
• What is a Collection? We Answer Your FAQs 
• Unlocking Research Impact: What Is a Springer Nature Collection? 
• Discover collections: An effective approach for enhancing article impact  
• Publishing to reach policymakers: Springer Nature Collections 
• Publishing to a Collection: Impact for Early Career Researchers 
• How Publishing in a Collection Ensured Malaria Control Guidance Reached Policymakers 
• How to create a truly impactful collection: Insights from an editor-in-chief 
• Guest Editor Q&A: Becoming a Springer Nature Guest Editor 
• How Springer Nature Collections power SDG research

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Most researchers don’t need another email. Between journal alerts, funding updates, institutional messages and general news, inboxes are already under pressure. Yet, for many readers around the world, Nature Briefing is a resource they deliberately make time to open. So, what makes it different?

Based on anonymised feedback from readers across disciplines, career stages and geographies, a clear picture emerges: Nature Briefing isn’t just another source of science news, it’s become a trusted daily ritual, helping researchers stay informed, curious and grounded in a fast‑moving and often overwhelming landscape. 

“Just wanted to drop a note to you saying that Nature Briefing is the only news I am opening these days. It’s a life saver. […] Even if the news isn’t great for science, it’s still a safe place to turn to. I always forward an article or two to family and friends.”

– Anonymised reader 

Get Nature Briefing in your inbox

Join researchers worldwide who start their day with a trusted filter for the most important science stories, curated by Nature editors.

What you’ll get: 

• A quick, readable daily roundup that saves you time 
• Context and clarity, not just headlines 
• Breadth across disciplines to spark new ideas

Free to sign up. Sign up here. 

Breadth that expands horizons, without overwhelming

Nature Briefing readers often work in highly specialised areas. But many say one of the newsletter’s strengths is helping them look beyond their own field. 

They value the range, from discoveries far outside their discipline to timely insights within it, and the sense of how science connects across topics, communities and real‑world events. Several readers mention using stories from the Briefing as conversation starters in lab meetings, teaching and everyday conversations. For them, the Briefing becomes a way to stay connected not just to science, but to how science fits into the world more broadly. 

For time‑constrained researchers, that balance is critical. As one long‑time reader put it, the Briefing offers “just enough to stay informed, without feeling overwhelmed”. 

“Like everyone, I receive Avogadro’s number of emails every day, many devoted to science news. Nature Briefing is my favorite, and I always look forward to reading it.”

– Anonymous reader

Thoughtful summaries that respect the reader

Another recurring theme is respect for the reader’s intelligence. 

Many readers compare Nature Briefing favourably to newsletter formats that rely on headlines alone or links without explanation. They appreciate that the summaries are written with care, offering context, nuance and clarity, rather than oversimplification or hype. 

This approach builds trust. Reader’s mention feeling confident that what they are reading has been chosen and written thoughtfully, drawing from multiple sources and perspectives. Over time, that consistency becomes a reason to keep opening the email, even when everything else in the inbox remains unread.

A human tone that makes science more enjoyable

Content matters, but so does tone. 

Across the feedback, readers repeatedly mention the warmth and humanity of Nature Briefing. Gentle humour, personal sign‑offs and moments of delight stand out in a professional environment that can otherwise feel impersonal or relentless. 

For some readers, especially those later in their careers, this tone makes it “a little more fun to be an active scientist”. For others, it simply makes the reading experience more enjoyable, which is a reminder that science can inspire curiosity, wonder and joy. 

“It’s a great balance of insightful and entertaining, and gives me the info (and a fun break) that I’m looking for."

— Tyler Arbour, Biogeochemist, Center for Microbial Ecology and Technology, University of Ghent

A steady place in uncertain times

Several readers describe Nature Briefing as more than a source of information, it’s a steady presence. 

In times when science funding, public trust, or global events make the news feel heavy, readers value having a place to turn that feels calm, balanced and reliable. Even when the stories themselves are challenging, the Briefing is seen as a space that avoids unnecessary alarmism while still taking science seriously. 

For some, maintaining that connection to science has a deeply personal meaning, helping them stay engaged with a subject they’ve dedicated their lives to, or feel close to conversations they once shared with others. 

That sense of steadiness shows up in small habits: readers returning to the Briefing even when the news is difficult, because the framing feels calm, balanced and grounded in evidence, without switching off from the world. 

Shared, forwarded and talked about

Nature Briefing rarely stays in one inbox. 

Readers frequently mention forwarding articles to colleagues, students, friends and family. Some describe printing out quotes or screenshots, pinning them up in workspaces, or bringing stories into teaching and lab discussions. 

This pattern of sharing reflects something important: readers don’t just consume the Briefing, they use it to communicate science, spark curiosity and connect with others.

More than a newsletter

For many researchers, Nature Briefing has become: 

• a trusted filter in a noisy information landscape 
• a window into science beyond a single discipline  
• a daily habit that fits into real working lives 
• a small daily reminder of curiosity, discovery, and why the work matters

It’s not just about staying up to date. It’s about staying connected, to ideas, to science in the wider world, and to a community of people who care about understanding it. 

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• How Nature Portfolio Authors balance life and research
• Making an impact: Nature Portfolio authors on their most influential articles
• Behind the results: Nature Portfolio authors speak about the unseen efforts underlying their research
• Nature Portfolio authors explain how inclusion and diverse perspectives strengthen their research
• Insider perspectives: What authors really think about publishing in Nature Reviews
• How Scientific Reports supports research careers
• What does it mean to be part of Nature Portfolio? We ask Scientific Reports authors
• The open access advantage: Real stories from multidisciplinary Scientific Reports authors 
• Scientific Reports: Your hub for global discovery

Publishing a book is a major achievement — one that deserves visibility within and beyond your discipline. In today’s digital landscape, social media is one of the most effective ways to help your work reach an audience who will benefit from it most. With researchers increasingly active on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and more. You have every reason to showcase your book there, too.

Our new guide: How to use social media to promote your Book, gets into the specifics of the most used platforms, and tips on choosing the right platform to engage with your research community. It's designed for all researchers, no matter what stage you are in your career. Whether you're just beginning to build your online presence or are already active on social platforms, this guide is for you. 

Why social media matters 

Social media was originally called social networking, and for research, that’s one of its superpowers. For research collaboration, it’s less about posting, re‑posting, and liking, and more about making connections that you can then take offline and into real life. But it makes finding connections — that you might not be able to make any other way — possible.  

You can find, follow, and join communities that share your research interests. You can also connect directly with readers and peers, including researchers in other countries. Which is why engaging regularly (even when you’re not discussing your book) makes it a uniquely powerful tool. 

What’s inside the guide 

This new guide gives you quick, actionable steps and best practices for promoting your book, and instructions for each platform. 

Choosing the right platform 

One of the most useful sections of the guide walks through how to get started, offering tips on the primary social media platforms to help you decide which one(s) are right for promoting your book, including: 

• LinkedIn for professional engagement and visual posts 
• Platform X/Twitter for real‑time conversations and tagging researchers 
• Instagram for visual content and guiding readers to book links directly through the stories feature 
• WeChat Ideal for Chinese researchers, and is widely used for research‑related activities.  
• Bluesky a newer platform where academic communities are beginning to grow 
• Facebook for groups and institutional pages

It also offers practical instructions for posting on each platform, including how to add links, hashtags, and use images and visuals of your book.

Book promotion toolkit

When you publish your book with Springer Nature, you will receive a link to the toolkit to help you spread the word. So, you don’t need to design any promotional assets yourself.

In the guide, you’ll find details about the bespoke marketing assets provided in the toolkit. Including how to search for your book title, download the promotional flyer, social media images, and email signature banner. 

Ready to get started?

Promoting your book on social media isn’t only about reach — it’s about sparking interest, encouraging meaningful discussion, and helping the right readers discover your work. And the benefits don’t stop there. A strong online presence grows with you, boosting visibility for future projects and collaborations. 

Download the guide to explore platform-specific advice, best practices, and real examples to help you promote your book with confidence.

For more tips on using social media read these articles from our social media series. 

Related content:

• Promote Your Book: Social Media Strategies for Authors
• Use social media to find collaborators in other countries
• A social media how-to for Chinese researchers
• Dos and don’ts of AI for social media 

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“SDG 17 is about partnership for the goals. And sort of the core principle, the core intuition, is that collaboration is needed to deal with complexity.” – Dr Kate Roll, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. 

The importance of partnership for sustainable development was covered in a recent Working Scientist podcast series from Nature Careers called ‘How to save humanity in 17 goals’. The sustainable development goals, or SDGs, are an important focus for us at Springer Nature, when we consider the positive impact we can have in disseminating research that can enable global progress.  

Our most important contribution is through our activity as a publisher. However, we go beyond that to support the communities we serve more directly. This includes a regular and carefully considered programme of charitable donations, giving over €3.5 million across multiple projects from 2022-2025. One principle has guided Springer Nature’s charitable support over the past three years: impact matters most when it is sustained, thoughtful and rooted in partnership. 

While there have been occasions that called for specific responses or one-off donations, such as our efforts to help colleagues and partners following the devastating Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica, or our focused support for researchers impacted by the war in Ukraine, our approach has focused on backing initiatives that strengthen the wider research and learning ecosystem over time. This means asking not only where help is needed, but how it can contribute to lasting outcomes for communities connected to science, education and advancing knowledge.

Strengthening science communication and trust 

Public trust in science depends not just on the quality of research, but on how well it is communicated and understood. For that reason, a core focus of our charitable activity has been supporting organisations that improve science communication and public understanding of research. This includes backing the global network of science media centres and the Springer Nature Fellowship for Advancing Science Journalism in Africa and the Middle East, offered in collaboration with the Knight Science Journalism (KSJ) Program at MIT, now in its third year. 

These initiatives play an important role in helping reliable evidence reach broader audiences, tackling misinformation, and supporting informed decision-making. In a world where scientific expertise is increasingly contested, strengthening these channels is a vital part of sustaining trust in research. 

Widening participation in research and learning 

Another priority has been widening participation in education and research. 

Through a mix of global programmes and locally led initiatives, our support has aimed to help people engage with learning, develop skills, and contribute to research. We’re proud to have supported over 70 students and early career researchers to take their first steps in research careers via programmes such as In2Research in the UK, the Deutschlandstipendium in Germany, and the Innovation in Cancer Research programme in the US.  

Looking to younger students, around 300 primary school aged children have attended the Civitas Saturday School in our London offices for extra support with maths and English since 2014. The school, which runs every weekend of term time, aims to help local children who have been identified as working below their expected level to make extra progress and thrive.   

Partnerships that strengthen research ecosystems in lower-income countries are also a focus. We are particularly proud of our association with Research4Life, which this year celebrates its 25th anniversary of enabling access to research for those in low-income countries, and which has evolved to build capability to support researchers around the global to contribute as authors, peer reviewers and editors.   

Access to knowledge remains uneven, but sustained investment in participation and capacity-building helps create the conditions for more inclusive and resilient research systems.

A partnership-led and principled approach

Since 2021, Springer Nature’s charitable giving has been guided by a clear framework and consistent governance. This helps ensure our support is strategic, transparent and aligned with our purpose of advancing discovery, learning and progress. 

Working with established and trusted partners allows us to contribute expertise as well as financial support, and to focus on outcomes rather than visibility.  It also helps ensure that our charitable activity complements, rather than substitutes for or hinders, the responsibilities and efforts of others across the research ecosystem or further afield.

Looking ahead

The challenges facing science, education and society are not short-term, and neither are the solutions. As Springer Nature looks ahead, our charitable support will continue to prioritise long-term impact, trusted partnerships and initiatives that help knowledge to be discovered, trusted and used. 

By keeping impact at the centre, we aim to contribute in ways that matter to research communities and learners, today and in the years to come.

For research organisations working to strengthen open science practices, the tenth anniversary of the FAIR principles is a timely milestone to take stock of what has changed and where more efforts are needed. As open data policies evolve, AI adoption accelerates, and expectations for data quality intensify, understanding researcher attitudes has never been more important.

The 2025 State of Open Data webinar brought together leading experts to discuss a decade of findings on researchers’ experience of, and attitudes towards, data sharing. In this blog, I explore key themes and persistent challenges to open data and highlight insights that can help institutions more effectively support meaningful and sustainable data sharing.

Closing the gap between Open Data ambition and everyday practice

Open data is no longer an emerging idea or an aspirational principle. The 2025 State of Open Data report, ‘A decade of progress and challenges,’ analyses ten years of tracking researcher experience and attitudes towards data sharing. It shows that open data has moved from the margins of scholarly practice into the mainstream.

Indeed, awareness is high, policies are widespread, and infrastructure exists. But data sharing is still not routine for many researchers, between mandate fatigue and a lack of recognition.

To examine the tensions between the progress and persistent obstacles, the webinar convened experts contributing to the 2025 report. Their perspectives provide a focused assessment of how far the community has come and what is required next to close the gap between intent and implementation, particularly for organisations aiming to support equitable and sustainable data‑sharing practices.

Webinar panel:

• Mark Hahnel, Vice President Open Research, Digital Science
• Graham Smith, Director Research Data Innovation, Springer Nature
• Brian Nosek, Co-founder and Executive Director, Center for Open Science; Professor of Psychology, University of Virginia (USA)
• Hilary Hanahoe, Secretary General, Research Data Alliance (RDA)
• Joy Owango, Founding Director, Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa) (Kenya)
• Chair: Ana Van Gulick, Head of Customer Engagement, Digital Science

“Open data has gone from novelty to mainstream… now everyone recognises that this is something that they need to wrestle with.”

- Brian Nosek, Co-founder and Executive Director, Center for Open Science; Professor of Psychology, University of Virginia

From awareness to infrastructure: The decade’s biggest shift

The State of Open Data survey has been running since 2016, capturing researchers’ relationships with data sharing. A decade on, it has impressive scale and global reach. Since its launch, the survey has gathered insights from over 43,000 researchers across 212 countries and territories, making it the longest-running longitudinal study on this topic. It also covers a wide range of institutional contexts, including universities, hospitals, industry, and government.

The webinar asked panellists how researchers’ perspectives on data sharing have evolved over this decade. One of the most significant changes is the steady rise in awareness of the FAIR principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability. Mark Hahnel describes this as a genuine success story: “About 80% of researchers globally have heard of FAIR or are familiar with FAIR. ‘Never heard of FAIR’ has gone from around 60% to 20%.” Importantly, this shift cuts across most disciplines, even if adoption still varies.

The deeper shift, as identified by Joy Owango, is the move “from awareness to infrastructure”. Ten years ago, many researchers simply did not know what open data meant or where to share their data. Today, FAIR-aligned repositories, persistent identifiers, and institutional policies are far more common.

The conditions to move beyond counting datasets towards thinking about quality are already here, according to Hahnel. “No one can say, ‘I don’t know where to put my data’ anymore,” he says.

Researchers are often judged by publications and journal prestige, not by the accessibility or reusability of their data sets.”

- Joy Owango, Founding Director, Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa)

Making data sharing routine: How organisations can support researchers

Awareness and infrastructure have improved so dramatically, but data sharing is still not routine. The problem is not principle, but practice, according to the webinar panel. What opportunities for organisations can we identify in the friction points researchers face that the panel discussed?

1. Helping researchers start earlier can make all the difference: Brian Nosek describes a familiar scenario: Researchers confront data-sharing requirements at the point of publication, long after data collection has concluded. At that point, preparing data for sharing becomes a burden. The well-intentioned policies turn into bureaucratic obstacles rather than good research practice. Organisations can certainly support researchers in prioritising data sharing from the start and guiding them throughout the research process. This support can make sharing an essential part of communicating research rather than an afterthought.
2. Supporting recognition for data sharing in research assessment: Deeper structural issues, particularly around incentives, also play a part. Researchers, Joy Owango notes, are still evaluated on publication and journal prestige, not on the accessibility or reusability of their data. Because of this lack of recognition in funding or promotion, data sharing remains a low priority even where infrastructure exists. Organisations can support the move towards broader recognition of data quality and openness in their own contexts, as well as more broadly in coordinated action and alignment across funders, publishers, and policy frameworks. By providing clear guidance, infrastructure, and training, they can help ensure data contributions are recognised as important research outputs.
3. Capacity differences show where targeted support can have real impac: Hilary Hanahoe highlights the cost of implementing FAIR properly and the disparities this creates: “Some institutions can afford specialised staff to support researchers; others cannot.” Indeed, institutional capacity is uneven, and these gaps are often amplified by regional and regulatory constraints. Where limited capacities are identified, institutions can attempt to address this collaboratively, for instance using joint training programmes or shared guidance as pooled capacity across institutions in a consortium or a region. These adjustments could produce meaningful gains and create more equitable conditions across the research ecosystem. 

AI and open data: Accelerating discovery, amplifying risk

The webinar speakers are in agreement that AI will redefine both the value and the risks associated with open data, and I couldn’t agree more. Adoption of AI tools by researchers is accelerating rapidly, Mark Hahnel notes, and at this pace, AI-assisted research will soon be near-universal. This creates new opportunities to enhance discovery and efficiency, while also highlighting areas where data practices can continue to strengthen.

Because AI systems are based on the input they are given, Joy Owango warns of poor metadata, biases, and mislabelling that can be amplified at scale. Continued investment in robust data stewardship is therefore increasingly valuable, to ensure that data sets are well-documented, clearly structured, and accurately labelled.

AI can also unintentionally narrow the landscape of research by privileging data that is already machine-readable and well documented, according to Graham Smith. That bias risks marginalising disciplines, regions, and forms of knowledge that are harder to standardise. This raises important questions for research organisations about how AI may shape what is visible in global research, and how existing support mechanisms might be adapted over time to avoid further marginalising less structured forms of knowledge.

Looking ahead, Hilary Hanahoe declares that the open data community has a duty, not just an opportunity, to shape the governance of AI use in research. In this important role, the open data community can contribute frameworks that prioritise transparency, inclusivity, and responsible use, and ensure that AI strengthens the research ecosystem.

“Policy on its own isn’t going to do the job. We’re talking about behavioural change, cultural change.”

- Graham Smith, Director Research Data Innovation, Springer Nature

From sharing data to doing it well: How institutions can support better data sharing

The challenge for the next decade is the shift from compliance to quality, from volume to value. And policies and mandates along cannot drive sustainable, meaningful data sharing practices. To support continued and better adoption of data sharing, institutions must increasingly be involved in shaping how research itself is produced, shared, and reused in the age of AI. Not just through their policies, but the actual experience of their researchers and how usable their data is.

As we’ve seen, awareness of data sharing is at an all-time high. This allows institutions to move beyond advocacy to operationalisation. To encourage the necessary cultural change, enabling good practice and making it easier than bad practice is key. Institutions can promote this, where possible, through practical support for data sharing, encouragement of data sharing research practices and discourses, and formal or informal recognition.

In this transitional timepoint, institutional infrastructure, services, and training should aim to support researchers in producing data that is usable and trustworthy. Discipline-specific guidance could round your offerings for holistic data sharing support. This support would ideally be offered early in the research lifecycle as well as throughout, and paired with practical tools such as templates, storage, curation time, and technical support. With this institutional leadership and support, the academic community will continue moving into a future in which data is reusable and reproducible, and the ecosystem is inclusive and trustworthy.

Understanding the state of open data can empower institutions to support data sharing proactively and appropriately. Watch the full webinar for more details and in-depth exchanges.

Related content:

• The 2025 State of Open Data report: Can technology push openness forward?
• Supporting open science: Exploring barriers and solutions to data sharing
• Supporting global open data through what really works
• The many dimensions of rethinking research assessment
• Increasing equity through open access agreements

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If you’re new to publishing in a collection, you shouldn’t have to guess what happens next, or where to go for help. In this post, we dig into the collections author journey and share what authors tell us in satisfaction feedback, alongside real author experiences, to show what outstanding support looks like in practice and what you can expect when you publish in a Springer Nature collection.

“Collections are really important for us because it's a way to offer researchers a home for their research, where we currently don't have the perfect journal for it. And oftentimes those are trending topics where it's just too soon to have a journal available on such a current or emerging topic.” 

– Daniel Korany, EVP Journals, Full Open Access Brands

Prefer the highlights? Watch the short video below for a quick summary of how experts working on Springer Nature collections keep your submission moving so you can focus on your research, not admin.

Supporting you from start to finish 

Publishing can sometimes feel overwhelming. That is why we built the CMA team, a dedicated group of experts from academia, publishing, and research. This team oversees each collection from proposal through publication and beyond, fostering collaboration and ensuring every project is meaningful and impactful. This specialised team is a defining hallmark of Springer Nature. 

From the initial idea to the final publication, our collections authors receive ongoing support to navigate peer review, production, and post-publication engagement with confidence. Our experts are here to guide you through the entire process and provide resources to support you at every stage.  

Think of your collection article as a chapter in a growing book, with each contribution adding something new. Our goal is to make your publishing journey as smooth and rewarding as possible. 

“At the end of the day, we're more than just a publishing team. We're partners in supporting the research community. Because we come from research, academia, and publishing ourselves, we understand what really matters: visibility, quality, and impact.”

— Petia Apostolova, Head of Collections

Author satisfaction: what collections authors tell us

Your trust drives everything we do. We measure our success by your satisfaction, and your feedback helps us continue improving.  

Farah Aldabbagh, Research Analyst from Springer Nature’s Market Intelligence team, explains: “To track and monitor author satisfaction, we send all corresponding authors a survey after online publication of their article, asking them about the general overall satisfaction with the journal they published with, and then satisfaction with specific aspects of the publishing experience.”  

Our latest survey data shows that 83% of collection authors are happy with their experience; a strong result that reflects our ongoing commitment to delivering an exceptional author experience at every stage—from clear guidance and thoughtful editorial input to responsive communication and transparent updates throughout the publishing journey. 

That overall satisfaction is reflected in the detail, too. When we look at specific stages of the journey, authors consistently tell us what’s working. In 2025, more than 90% of authors rated the peer review process, editorial collaboration, communication, and production workflow highly, confirming that our dedicated teams deliver an outstanding author experience.  

So far this year, the results are tracking similarly: over 90% of authors felt peer review was useful in improving their manuscript, editor advice and comments were helpful, and their manuscript underwent an appropriate number of rounds, with reviewers that had a good understanding of their topic.

Authors also report a consistently strong service experience, including: 

• enquiries being answered promptly 

• helpful depth of information in responses 

• and clear updates on your manuscript status throughout the process

You should be able to publish with complete confidence, knowing you’ll be supported to help your manuscript reach its highest potential. This feedback from collection authors shows that our commitment is real and reinforced through continuous feedback and improvement.

Collections author experiences: visibility, impact and outcomes

Publishing in a Springer Nature collection enhances the reach and real-world impact of an article, and Dr Alfred Eboh from Kogi State University can testify to this. When he published his study on addressing malaria through healthcare expenditures in a Springer Nature collection, his work was academically recognised and referenced in the WHO’s World malaria report 2024. In this Q&A blog, Dr Eboh shares his experience publishing in the collection and the gratification of seeing it inform global policy.

“Publishing in a dedicated Springer Nature Collection has increased my work’s visibility among health systems researchers and donors. It's also strengthened my CV by demonstrating engagement with a focused, high-impact journal early in my career.” 

— Dr Alfred Eboh, Department of Sociology, Kogi State University, Nigeria

Megha Rao and her co-authors wanted to publish their research on health resource allocation in Malawi where it will reach the very people who could implement their findings and suggestions. Learn more about Rao’s experience publishing in the collection, and subsequent inquiries from policy makers about adapting and implementing her work across Africa

“Publishing in the Collection has given this research much greater visibility, specifically because it showcases the real-world application in Malawi. This has acted as a powerful proof-of-concept.[…] Collections offer an excellent opportunity to ensure one’s research contributes directly to a specific, impactful conversation, reaching the very people who can act on it. It’s about getting the work in front of the right audience, not just the biggest one.” 

- Megha Rao, Research Fellow for the Thanzi Labwino (Better Health) project

For Dr. Federico Virga, publishing his work in a Springer Nature collection not only enhanced the visibility of his research but also propelled his career to new heights. He adds, “I’ve already had two citations. I was also contacted by a student from outside Europe who asked me if I have a PhD position, and some companies have also been in touch to suggest we might collaborate. I can’t go into details yet, but some want feedback or to see if I can help them to develop specific tools related to my field.” 

“Publishing to the collection really was a great opportunity for me; I was extremely surprised and happy about the visibility I could get in a short time.” 

— Dr. Federico Virga developed his research in Italy (University of Turin), Belgium (VIB-KU Leuven) and Spain (CNIO and CNIC)  

Why authors choose Springer Nature collections

When you choose a Springer Nature collection, you gain:

• Expert guidance and dedicated support: We help you navigate publishing challenges with a dedicated team ready to support you. 

• Faster publishing for timely impact: We launch collections quickly to help your work reach the right audience sooner. 

• Research integrity and credibility: We uphold rigorous peer review standards, so your work is trusted and respected. 

• Global connections: Collections connect you to a thriving community of researchers and guest editors in your field. 

• Increased visibility: Articles published in collections receive more citations, downloads, and online attention, helping you build your academic reputation. 

• Continuous improvement: We listen to your feedback and develop our author services, so your experience only gets better. 

Benefits of publishing in a Springer Nature collection

When an article is part of a collection, it is easier to discover, attracts more attention, and reaches a broader audience. The data proves it: authors publishing in Springer Nature Collections enjoy 31% more citations, 30% more downloads, and 62% higher Altmetric scores than articles outside collections.

For researchers, publishing in Springer Nature collections means greater visibility, stronger influence, and deeper connections within their field.

Your publishing partner: support beyond submission

We see ourselves as more than just a publisher; we are your partners. Your research deserves a home where it is prioritised, cherished, and amplified; and that is exactly what we offer. Petia sums it up well: “We care deeply about your research and your success. Our team is dedicated to ensuring that your work reaches its full potential.”

If you’re interested in publishing your work in a Springer Nature collection, check out our dedicated Springer Nature collections website, where you can find interviews with guest editors, impact case studies, author success stories, and much more.

Related Content

• Safeguarding Springer Nature collections: the integrity checks you should know about

• What is a Collection? We Answer Your FAQs

• Unlocking Research Impact: What Is a Springer Nature Collection?

• Discover collections: An effective approach for enhancing article impact 

• Publishing to reach policymakers: Springer Nature Collections

• Publishing to a Collection: Impact for Early Career Researchers

• How Publishing in a Collection Ensured Malaria Control Guidance Reached Policymakers

• How to create a truly impactful collection: Insights from an editor-in-chief

• Guest Editor Q&A: Becoming a Springer Nature Guest Editor

• How Springer Nature Collections power SDG research

As an early-career researcher, you are producing work that matters. You are contributing new perspectives, asking new questions, and pushing knowledge forward. But once your work is written, submitted, or published, a familiar challenge often appears. How do you make sure the right people see it?

The visibility gap

Many early-career researchers describe a clear visibility gap. They want their research to be read, understood, and shared, but they are unsure how or where to begin. Publishing alone no longer guarantees attention, and yet the skills needed to communicate research effectively are rarely taught in a structured way.

Researchers frequently express uncertainty around communicating their findings beyond immediate field. Questions such as how to talk about research clearly, how to adapt messaging for different audiences, or which digital channels are worth using often go unanswered. At the same time, early career researchers are navigating publishing pressures, funding expectations, short‑term contracts, and heavy workloads. With so much to manage, research visibility can feel overwhelming or even optional.

This uncertainty does not reflect a lack of ambition or ability. It reflects a lack of practical guidance. Visibility is increasingly expected of researchers, but many are left to figure it out alone.

Research visibility and what it unlocks

When research visibility is approached thoughtfully, it can unlock far more than increased readership. Strong communication helps your work travel beyond traditional boundaries, opening up new professional and personal opportunities.

Clear and effective research communication can expand your reach by helping others grasp why your work matters. It can increase influence by making your ideas more accessible to researchers outside your immediate specialism, as well as to practitioners, policymakers, educators, and the wider public. Over time, this reach helps build recognition and establishes your expertise within your field.

Visibility also plays an important role in confidence. Seeing how your work is read, shared, and discussed helps you understand its real‑world relevance. This feedback can be motivating, especially at an early career stage when self‑doubt is common and progress can feel slow.

Professional opportunities often follow. Researchers who communicate their work clearly are better positioned when applying for funding, jobs, or fellowships. Visibility can lead to new collaborations by making your interests and expertise easier to find. It can also support teaching, outreach, and engagement activities that strengthen your academic profile.

Importantly, visibility does not mean self‑promotion for its own sake. It means helping your research reach the audiences it was always meant for.

Building researcher confidence through skills focused webinar

Recognising these challenges, a dedicated webinar titled “How to Promote Your Research” was designed with early career researchers in mind. The session was built as a researcher-first resource, focused on practical skills.

The webinar responds directly to the uncertainty many researchers feel about visibility and communication. Instead of abstract theory, it focuses on what research visibility actually looks like in practice today and which approaches can be applied immediately without adding unnecessary pressure.

The strong response to the session highlighted just how relevant this topic is. More than 560 researchers attended our last session live, demonstrating widespread interest in building confidence and capability around research communication. Throughout the session, participants asked thoughtful, practical questions that reflected real challenges they face in promoting their work.

One participant, postdoctoral researcher Maria Babakhanyan Stone, joined the webinar out of curiosity and a desire to build on her existing interest in science communication.

During her PhD, Maria invested significant effort in making astronomy accessible. She created YouTube explainer videos, developed visuals from her thesis figures, and ran workshops for learners of all ages. Communication had always been important to her, but the webinar introduced her to new ways of understanding how that work resonated.

When altmetrics were discussed, she decided to explore the publicly available download data for her PhD thesis at the University of Turku. What she found surprised her. Her astronomy thesis had been downloaded more frequently than others in the same topic area, topping usage rankings over a seven‑year period and ranking among the most downloaded astronomy theses of the past decade.

For Maria, this discovery revealed a hidden dimension of impact. It showed that her efforts to make science welcoming and engaging were reaching real readers. The numbers mattered, but what mattered more was the confirmation that her work was making a difference.

Her experience highlights how understanding visibility can strengthen confidence and reshape how researchers think about their contribution.

Join the next session

Building research visibility is not about changing who you are as a researcher. It is about learning how to help your work be seen, understood, and valued for what it already contributes.

If you are an early-career researcher who feels unsure about where to start with communication and visibility, the “How to Promote Your Research” webinar offers a practical and supportive next step. It is designed to help you develop skills that build confidence, expand reach, and open up new opportunities over time.

You can explore upcoming sessions and related resources here.

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• Discover journals: Open access funding options for our authors
• Open access in action—Stories from around the world: Hospices Civils de Lyon, France
• Open access in action—Stories from around the world: Dr Ruiz Serrano
• Navigating open access article processing charges: A guide for researchers

As the adoption of AI spreads, its potential to accelerate discovery and address global challenges is being tempered by mounting concerns over sustainability and equity. These questions took centre stage in early 2026, when The University of Tokyo and Springer Nature co-hosted the seventh SDG Symposium on AI and Sustainability—Opportunities and Challenges for a Sustainable Future. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now deeply entrenched within research and is widely anticipated to accelerate scientific discovery and help tackle global challenges. Yet there is another side to AI that cannot be ignored—immense consumption of electricity and water, dependence on scarce materials, and the reproduction, or even amplification, of existing inequalities. 

At the SDG Symposium, leaders from academia, publishing, industry and international organisations looked at both AI’s costs and benefits from a variety of perspectives. They were joined by about 500 global participants.  

Emerging from the symposium was a clear recognition that ‘sustainable AI’ is far more than a matter of technical and logistical optimisation; rather, it is a broader challenge that compels us to reconsider ethics, social structures, institutions, and patterns of resource distribution. 

In his opening remarks, Teruo Fujii, President of The University of Tokyo, stressed that this challenge demands collaboration among diverse actors, including leaders in the spheres of technology, industry, academia and policy. 

Physical constraints on the digital realm 

When interacting with AI through smartphones and laptops, it is easy to imagine that its computations occur somewhere nebulous in ‘the cloud’. In reality, AI is profoundly physical. 

Magdalena Skipper, Editor-in-Chief of Nature and Chief Editorial Adviser for Nature Portfolio, presented stark data on the direct environmental burdens of AI’s rapid uptake. Searches using generative AI consume four to five times more energy than conventional web searches. Large data centres also require vast quantities of cooling water. In one reported case, a regional cluster of data centres consumed about 6% of the area’s monthly water supply. 

What may appear modest in global aggregate terms could pose a major threat to local communities. Skipper stressed the importance of making these hidden burdens visible, suggesting that just as light bulbs carry energy information such as wattage, AI chatbots might also display a comparable indicator. 

A further warning came from Tshilidzi Marwala, Rector of the United Nations University and an under-secretary-general of the United Nations. Manufacturing AI hardware requires rare earth elements, whose extraction imposes substantial environmental and social costs. Marwala challenged prevailing growth models that seek to maximise shareholder returns. He also cautioned that infinite growth cannot be achieved with finite resources. 

The recycling rate for rare earths is currently below 1%. Unless sustainability is embedded from the earliest stages of hardware design—as a third core metric alongside cost and performance—AI development may run up against the limits of the planetary environment. 

The semiconductor industry’s responsibility 

Positioned at the leading edge of the physical infrastructure underpinning AI, the semiconductor industry is not insulated from these concerns. Yuji Ogino, global head of sustainability at the semiconductor production equipment manufacturer Tokyo Electron, pointed to projections suggesting that surging demand for AI devices could drive the semiconductor market to US$1 trillion by 2030. 

AI’s progress has been propelled by the miniaturisation and increasing integration density of semiconductors, but this entails a steep rise in electricity consumption of data centres, along with a corresponding rise in carbon-dioxide emissions. Technological advances must come with a transition in data-centre energy sources from fossil fuels to low-carbon alternatives, Ogino argued. 

In his view, ‘systemic governance’ requires simultaneous, integrated engagement with energy management and the environment, alongside ethics and human rights. In other words, governance cannot lag behind technological innovation. 

Elite capture or inclusive transformation? 

Another central theme? Fairness and equity, specifically, inclusion. Marwala noted that 80% of AI investment is concentrated in the United States and China. Left unchecked, such concentration risks expanding the gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged. 

Ayyoob Sharifi, Professor in sustainability at Hiroshima University, explored both the promise and the peril of AI in smart-city development. Sharifi urged society to move beyond a narrowly technical imagination. The essential question, he argued, is not simply whether something can improve efficiency, but whether it advances justice and sustainability. 

Interlocking SDG targets 

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations are interdependent. Xin Zhou, Director of the AI and New Frontier Group at the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, highlighted the synergies and trade-offs involved. For example, progress in decarbonization (Goal 13) can yield spillover benefits for clean energy (Goal 7) and health (Goal 3); however, expansion of renewable energy may also compete with food systems or land use. 

Zhou expressed concern that policymaking too often remains siloed and argued that this is precisely where AI’s deeper value may lie. It could help visualise the complex interdependencies among water, energy and food systems, update risk maps in real time and support integrated policy decisions. 

But AI will not automatically repair fragmentation; it could just as easily deepen it. Whether AI accelerates sustainability or entrenches inequality and division, Zhou argued, will ultimately depend on governance. 

Physical AI and dialogue with society 

The symposium also considered the challenges posed by physical AI—AI moving beyond digital systems and into real-world space. Hironobu Takagi, Executive Director of the science museum Miraikan and senior researcher at IBM Research–Tokyo, highlighted the social dimensions of such a transition. 

Here, science communication is crucial. Social implementation depends on how sighted participants interact with the robot in demonstration trials and help co-create social rules needed for its use. 

From carbon reduction to social design 

The panel discussion broadened the debate. The moderator, Hiromi Yokoyama, Professor at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at The University of Tokyo, reframed the scale of the problem. Sustainable AI, she argued, is not merely about reducing carbon footprints; more fundamentally, it concerns how societies design the social, economic and governance systems in which AI is embedded. 

In practice, the primary beneficiaries of AI often differ from those who bear its costs—whether in the form of depleted water and electricity supplies, or the broader social burdens of intensified surveillance. These asymmetries are unevenly distributed across both geography and generations. 

Regulation cannot rest with a single actor, the panel agreed. Rather, it requires a multilayered approach spanning the international community, nation states and industry. Yet it also acknowledged sobering realities: regulatory evasion through loopholes, and unavoidable disparities in AI performance for languages and populations that remain poorly represented in data. Future AI systems, the discussion suggested, should disclose such limitations as explicitly as the side effects of drugs are disclosed. 

A future built on inclusive participation 

Perhaps the clearest message was that AI development suffers from a profound lack of transparency, accountability and cross-border, multilevel cooperation. Marwala argued that the overwhelming underrepresentation of Global South languages and cultures in AI training data was an ethical failure. 

Addressing this challenge from the perspective of scholarly publishing, Antoine Bocquet, Managing Director of Springer Nature Japan, pointed to another structural imbalance: the unequal distribution of knowledge that informs policymaking. Springer Nature’s analysis, he noted, found that 78% of the research cited in policy documents originates from authors in the Global North, revealing a persistent geographical asymmetry in whose knowledge counts. 

Kensuke Fukushi, Director of the Institute for Future Initiatives at The University of Tokyo, closed the symposium by emphasizing the value of academic collaboration as the foundation for dialogue and shared rule-making in an increasingly fragmented world. In a divided world, he suggested, scholarly collaboration is essential. 

The road to sustainable AI will not be smooth. A system in which the benefits of AI are monopolized by the powerful and by a limited number of advanced, affluent countries, while environmental and social burdens are displaced onto future generations and vulnerable regions, demands correction. 

The central question is whether AI can be transformed from something that intensifies environmental strain and inequality into an infrastructure that supports a sustainable society. The answer lies not within algorithms alone, but in the wisdom and governance of the people who design, use, regulate and learn to live alongside them. 

Discover more from our SDG programme — featuring events, blogs and publications on sustainability and research.

Related content:

• How SDG research drives policy: A special report 
• Can open access help SDG research achieve greater impact? 
• Researchers embrace AI. The disclosure gap is the challenge 

Don't miss the latest news and blogs, sign up to The Researcher's Source Monthly Digest! 

As a researcher, you’ve probably wondered whether your work is the right fit for a particular journal, or whether the journal is the right fit for you. Maybe your topic is niche. Maybe your institution doesn’t carry the kind of prestige that opens doors, or your methods or topic come from different disciplines. These doubts are understandable. Many journals favour research from well-funded settings, established institutions, and a narrow band of topics. That leaves a lot of unpublished research.

With more than 70 titles, the Discover journal series was created in response to this. The series is an open access (OA) imprint within Springer Nature’s portfolio of over 600 fully OA journals, one of the largest OA portfolios in the world.

What does representation mean at Discover?

For Discover journals, representation means one thing: all good research deserves to be published, on its merits alone. In practice, this means your paper won’t be screened out because of your research area, a regional focus, or if your approach crosses subject boundaries.

For early career researchers (ECRs), this is reassuring. Many researchers will recognise that sense of doubt when submitting work: Is my article relevant or novel enough? Discover journals embed representation through:

• broad aims and scope that welcome interdisciplinary research and non-traditional article types
• a commitment to publishing valid work, not on its perceived novelty or impact but solely on its own merits
• OA publishing under a Creative Commons licence, free to read, share and reuse
• financial support through institutional agreements and article processing charge (APC) waivers, so that who can publish isn’t determined by who can afford to

Our mission at Springer Nature is to facilitate inclusion. We believe that “research progress depends on the inclusion of diverse perspectives, and the best research emerges when researchers from all backgrounds are empowered to contribute fully.” Discover journals are designed to deliver on this policy.

Watch this author interview compilation video to hear researchers from different disciplines, locations, and career stages share how publishing in Discover journals helped them reach the right audience for their interdisciplinary and emerging research.

OA and community reach

For Atique Ishrak Anik and Dr. Vicky Xu, OA wasn’t a publishing preference. It was the point of publishing. Both chose Discover journals because their research was written for specific communities, and those communities needed to be able to read it.

Atique Ishrak Anik is a civil engineer and researcher at Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology, Bangladesh. He leads a multi-disciplinary team that covers structural engineering, environmental research, and social science. His focus is on developing sustainable alternatives to high-emission building materials and practical housing solutions for people living in low- and middle-income country contexts.

Anik chose Discover Civil Engineering because its OA model ensures his work reaches the researchers and practitioners who need it most. For him, publishing OA isn't a secondary consideration but the foundation of his work; without it, essential findings would be locked behind expensive subscription barriers.

“We want to publish our study to a wide global area, without any subscription barriers. That's why we think Discover Civil Engineering is a good home for our work.”

— Atique Ishrak Anik, Discover Civil Engineering

Dr. Vicky Xu is a clinical psychology registrar at the University of Sydney, Australia. She co-designed a research project on emotion regulation involving target communities from the outset. When it came to publishing their findings, her team chose Discover Psychology—now celebrating its 5th anniversary—for its OA model and broad scope, spanning clinical, cognitive, organisational, and social psychology. Their paper attracted media interest, and a plain-language version was subsequently published, bringing the findings directly to the young people affected, their families, and the people working with them.

“It was really important to us that our findings would have the biggest reach.”

— Dr. Vicky Xu, Discover Psychology

Diverse teams, disciplines, and geographies

Representation is evident in who is producing research and where it originates. Discover journals publish a varied mix of researchers representing different disciplines, countries, and career stages, including the four researchers featured below.

Ayesha Nehvi published her first research paper, analysing why psychology students avoid certain specialisms, while studying at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Discover Psychology provided an APC waiver that allowed the student-focused study to become OA, ensuring the target community could access the research.

Dr. Sara Causevic, a postdoctoral fellow at Stockholm University, Sweden, is a public health researcher. A paper she co-authored on AI and forest protection took her outside her usual field and brought together colleagues from climate finance and remote sensing technology. The paper was published in Discover Conservation.

Dr. Paul Awoyera, an associate professor of civil engineering at Prince Mohammed bin Fahd University, Saudi Arabia, is developing alternative construction materials that reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions in buildings. Dr Awoyera chose Discover Sustainability because its OA model ensures the findings reach not only researchers but the engineers who can act on them.

Enoch Leung, a student and course instructor at McGill University, Canada, leads an interdisciplinary team researching inclusive education and support for LGBTQ+ youth in schools. The team chose Discover Education (also celebrating its fifth anniversary this year) for its commitment to equity and its reach across education and psychology. For Leung, open access was essential; the findings had to reach the educators and counsellors working with students, as well as academics.

“Research done for the community, by the community.”

— Dr. Vicky Xu, Discover Psychology

Choosing a journal: why representation matters

Choosing where to publish is an important task. To get it right, ask yourself the following questions:

• Does the journal welcome research across disciplines and subjects, including interdisciplinary and applied work?
• Are the editorial board and published author lists geographically and demographically diverse?
• Is the journal fully OA, with potential APC coverage or funding options available, if required?

Discover journals can answer yes to all three. To see how this fits into Springer Nature’s broader commitment to global inclusion, visit our Global Inclusion in Research Publishing web page for practical tools and resources.

Being representative isn’t an afterthought at Springer Nature. It affects careers and knowledge alike, and prioritising inclusion helps ensure good work doesn’t go unpublished or unread because of where it came from or who could afford to access it.

Whatever your field, your background, or your career stage, we think your work deserves a trusted home. Explore the Discovery journal series and consider us for your next submission.

Featured research

• Atique Ishrak Anik, Discover Civil Engineering
  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44290-024-00018-6

• Vicky Xu, Discover Psychology
  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-023-00111-4

• Ayesha Nehvi, Discover Psychology
  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-024-00189-4

• Sara Causevic, Discover Conservation
  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44353-024-00002-2

• Paul Awoyera, Discover Sustainability
  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-024-00655-y

• Enoch Leung, Discover Education
  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-022-00016-9

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Demonstrating how research contributes to real-world change is an increasing priority for institutions working towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  As explored in The publication-to-policy connection: Supporting the real-world impact of research, impact depends not only on producing high-quality evidence, but on how effectively it is translated, shared, and applied in policy and practice. This case study builds on that perspective by examining the work of AE4RIA (the Alliance of Excellence for Research and Innovation on Aephoria), showing how a systems-based approach, combining integrated data, stakeholder collaboration and aligned financing, can help move research beyond policy influence into coordinated, implementable action.

Springer Nature’s recent report, From publications to policy: the impact of research towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, shows that evidence is already shaping national and international policymaking when it comes to the SDGs. But ensuring that research is not only accessed, but also acted upon, requires more than visibility. It requires the capacity to translate knowledge into coordinated, implementable action.

For institutions committed to strengthening research impact, supporting multi-stakeholder collaboration, or contributing to national sustainability agendas, AE4RIA (the Alliance of Excellence for Research and Innovation on Aephoria) offers a practical and replicable framework. Working at the intersection of economics, earth systems science, and policy, their systems-driven approach is grounded in integrated data, stakeholder co-design, and aligned financing to help move the SDGs from ambition into action.

Through the work of AE4RIA, Director and co-chair of the 2027 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Report, Professor Phoebe Koundouri and colleagues explain how a systems‑based approach can help institutions move research beyond policy influence into tangible, funded outcomes.

The implementation gap: from framework to delivery

For AE4RIA, the SDGs provide a powerful framework for addressing what Professor Koundouri describes as a “permanent multi-crisis” across environmental, economic and social systems. “The SDGs for us are a brilliant science-based structure that can allow us to move away from the permanent multi-crisis of natural, social, and economic systems into a sustainable pathway,” she explains.

However, while global progress has been significant (196 countries signing the SDGs and 20% implementation in just ten years), translating this framework into delivery remains complex. The challenge is not only political or financial, but structural. “Even the most developed countries lack the capacity to organize the necessary data, modelling, stakeholders, or funding approaches, and very few people work on this kind of large-scale integration,” Professor Koundouri adds. “Those who do are mainly scientists, and they don’t have continuous interaction with policymakers, governments, and all the other stakeholders needed to implement change.”

For institutions, this highlights that producing high-quality research is not enough to impact the SDGs. Success depends on the ability to connect evidence across disciplines, stakeholders, and systems in ways that support implementation.

A systems approach to research impact

AE4RIA’s methodology is designed to address this gap by translating the SDGs into actionable, financed transition pathways. At its core is a systems-based approach that integrates four interconnected domains, nature, infrastructure, economy and society, recognising that progress in one depends on coordinated change across all.

Professor Koundouri outlined the methodology’s three structured steps:

1. Measure and understand where you are 
   Using integrated data frameworks, AE4RIA helps define where a country, region, or sector currently stands in relation to SDG targets. “We have continuous monitoring and assessment of the scale we want to work on. We have co-developed with other institutions an extensive framework of matrices that allow you to quantify where you are.” 

2. Develop pathways that cross silos and sectors
   Next, stakeholders work together to map out how to move from the current state to SDG-aligned outcomes. “We make explicit where we are, where we want to go, and then we design systems-based pathways that allow the transition for each sector of the economy to a sustainable interaction between the four main systems: nature, infrastructure, economy, and society.” The process is iterative and co-designed with stakeholders at each stage. 

   Underpinning this step is an integrated modelling system – a “digital twin” of the economy and environment – which allows stakeholders to test transition pathways before implementation. By simulating different scenarios, stakeholders can identify trade-offs, understand cross-sector impacts, and prioritise the most effective interventions.

3. Align financing with the transition
   “The third step is to secure the money and instruments needed to deliver the plan described in step two.” This involves identifying funding sources, designing blended finance strategies, and structuring portfolios of projects that can realistically be delivered. For institutions, this reinforces a critical point: research impact depends not only on generating evidence, but on connecting that evidence to real-world funding and delivery mechanisms.

Putting systems thinking into practice: Living Labs

AE4RIA implements this approach through structured “living labs”: collaborative environments where research, policy, and practice come together to design and test real-world solutions.

For institutions, living labs offer a practical model for embedding research within decision-making processes, bringing together policymakers, industry, researchers, financiers, and civil society to co-develop solutions grounded in both evidence and local context. “We have developed different case studies across Europe, bringing together stakeholders to co-design the problem, the capacity on the ground, and potential solutions”, Phoebe Koundouri explains. 

One example focused on improving the climate resilience of Mediterranean ports (and by extension SDG13 and SDG14). Stakeholders included port authorities, ministries, businesses, financial institutions, regulators, NGOs, and researchers. These groups first agreed on the current state using shared data and modelling insights. They then co-designed a future vision and year-by-year transition actions to reach SDG targets. A digital innovation platform, BRIGAID, supported knowledge sharing and the integration of market-ready climate adaptation solutions.

Enabling collaboration: Engagement and digital infrastructure

Co-development of solutions like this relies heavily on participation from a wide range of stakeholders, which can be a challenge. “It’s a volunteering process, but it’s costly,” explains Eleni Toli, Senior Researcher, AE4RIA. Maintaining participation relies on transparency and accountability, as well as financial support for key contributors.

“Sometimes you start with high ambitions and engagement, but after some time, people tend to be less involved. It’s also a burden for the organisers. It’s important that key stakeholders are reimbursed for their work and also supported in doing [it].” - Eleni Toli, Senior Researcher, AE4RIA

These challenges directly informed AE4RIA’s development of digital tools to support its Living Labs. These tools function as shared knowledge infrastructure, providing democratic access to information, a record of actions, and continuous collaboration across stakeholders.

Crucially, the platform connects participants to the underlying modelling system, enabling stakeholders to move beyond discussion to evidence-based decision-making. Different policy options, investment choices, or technological interventions can be explored and tested within the model, helping participants understand trade-offs, identify synergies across sectors, and anticipate economic and social impacts before implementation.

Ensuring knowledge transfer and scalability

AE4RIA’s approach is designed to scale learnings from one setting can be applied in others, without having to start again from scratch. “The systems thinking and modelling approach aims to cover all countries in the world”, explains Professor Koundouri.

Using a taxonomy of similarity (economic, political, policy or socioeconomic similarity), elements of a case study can be transferred and replicated to others across the region. While transferred pathways may not have the same level of detail as a full case study, they provide a strong foundation for integration into national plans. For institutions, this demonstrates how research impact can extend beyond individual projects, contributing to broader, transferable solutions.

Springer Nature’s SDG report highlights the growing connection between research and policy. AE4RIA’s work demonstrates what it takes to extend that connection into implementation.  For institutions, the opportunity now lies in moving beyond knowledge production and dissemination to actively supporting the systems that enable research to be used, connecting data, stakeholders and funding in ways that translate research into delivery.

Take a closer look at the report: From publications to policy: The impact of research towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

About Professor Dr. Phoebe Koundouri

Professor Dr. Phoebe Koundouri is a globally renowned mathematical economist who has pioneered human-centred, interdisciplinary modelling systems for the sustainable interaction between nature, society, and the economy. She brings nearly 30 years of academic leadership and research excellence at leading institutions, including the University of Cambridge, University College London (UCL), the London School of Economics (LSE), the University of Reading, and the Technical University of Denmark. She is consistently ranked among the top 2% of world scientists in multiple prestigious international listings, with an academic record that includes 21 books, more than 800 published papers, over 100 large-scale research projects, and measurable impact in more than 120 countries.

She is currently Professor at the School of Economics, Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB); Visiting Professor at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge; and Senior Research Fellow at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, her alma mater. She is the Founder of the Alliance of Excellence for Research and Innovation on Aeiphoria (AE4RIA), a global research and innovation network bringing together more than 200 researchers. AE4RIA is anchored in ReSEES.AE4RIA at AUEB and SDU.AE4RIA at the ATHENA Information Technology Research Center, both research centres directed by Professor Koundouri.

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• Supporting global open data through what really works
• The Continuing Rise of Collaboration
• The state of research assessment: Insights from a survey of 6,600+ researchers
• Publishing SDG research: Initiatives that support your institution’s efforts

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This post is the second in a blog series focused on researchers’ experiences with open science practices, highlighting the impact of sharing data, code and protocols openly.   

Professor Zornitza Stark is a clinical geneticist at the Victorian Clinical Genetics Services in Melbourne, Australia. She works in the field of translational genomics, specialising in rare diseases. As a senior researcher, Zornitza Stark has wide publishing experience, with recent articles published in Nature Portfolio journals, such as this Call to action to scale up research and clinical genomic data sharing and Feasibility, acceptability and clinical outcomes of the BabyScreen+ genomic newborn screening study. She is also Associate Editor for NPJ Genomic Medicine and has frequently published in the European Journal of Human Genetics.  

We asked Professor Stark to share her experiences of open science practices and the impact that open data sharing has on patients and their families.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and your research area?  

I'm a clinician researcher, so my time is split between clinical work and research. My research tends to be very translational; it's closely related to the type of clinical work that I do, which is primarily with families affected by rare disease. There are several projects that we're currently working on, including genomic newborn screening. We are also exploring how to leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches to scale up the analysis or reanalysis of genomic data. I'm heavily involved in novel gene discovery for rare conditions and research into how to speed up the implementation of genomic testing into clinical practice, in particular how to generate the evidence that governments and policymakers need to fund it as part of healthcare. A big portion of my work involves working out the health economics for specific clinical applications of genomics. 

How did you first become interested in open science practices?  

Translational genomics is a relatively new field, which involves the application of new technologies. Working out how to do it is heavily dependent on sharing knowledge, but genomics also depends on the sharing of data; we need data for as many individuals as possible to work out what is rare and significant.  

As a community, we share data using specific genetics platforms, such as Gene Matcher, ClinVar, and Shariant (an Australian genomics-led variant sharing initiative). I also lead PanelApp Australia, a platform for sharing information on gene–disease associations for diagnostic use. Through this platform , we contribute to the Gene Curation Coalition, which is an international aggregation database of gene-disease relationships. 

In addition to data sharing, what open science practices do you use? 

From the sharing of code right through to how to conduct an economic evaluation as a protocol, or publishing a paper open access, we’re sharing knowledge on how to do relatively new tasks, because we're all new to this field.  

What motivated you to adopt these practices?  

“Open science ensures we share knowledge as quickly as possible, because that's what impacts both research and clinical outcomes” 

                              Zornitza Stark, Victorian Clinical Genetics Services, Melbourne, Australia  

I think most people are in medicine and research for altruistic reasons. I believe in the underlying premise of open science. We are also generally funded by public funds, and work in a public healthcare system. I strongly feel that public funds should be used to create public goods. 

Open science also ensures we share knowledge as quickly as possible, because that's what impacts both research and clinical outcomes. And those two are very closely intertwined in my type of work. 

Have you ever faced any particular challenges or barriers in undertaking open science practices?  

For the area that I work in, there is a lot of dependence on infrastructure. We know there is willingness from patients and research participants to share their data — that’s generally not a barrier — and most researchers also feel the same way. When we have been held back, it has been through a lack of political will to resolve potential legal issues and the lack of investment in large-scale infrastructure that would enable much more data sharing to occur. 

As an example, as a federated country, Australia has not been able to create a centralised Australian genomic dataset that could aggregate genomic data from across the country. This is due to a lack of investment in infrastructure and agreement between all the parties that we can share across borders. Contrast that to the National Genomic Research Library set up in England, which has managed to aggregate hundreds of thousands of datasets into a single infrastructure that can be queried by researchers. 

Is there a particular success story or example you're proud of that illustrates the benefits of open science?

“Sharing data openly has also had an impact on citations: being recognised by the international community as a contributor increases the visibility of our work.” 

                                                                                                      Zornitza Stark, Victorian Clinical Genetics Services, Melbourne, Australia  

We have been better at organising data sharing for other types of data, including data at gene variant level, which is crucially important in terms of facilitating the accurate interpretation of genomic data. Because it is considered to be more de-identified, there has been less objection, and we have been able to build the necessary infrastructure to share this data type. As a country, this infrastructure has enabled us to participate in international databases such as ClinVar, massively accelerating our submission to this open international resource. 

Having our own data accessible in both national and international databases actually alerts us when we have potentially misinterpreted something. It allows researchers to get in touch with us if they disagree with our assessment, which is often very helpful because it can have an impact on patient diagnosis. From a research perspective, it has enabled us to participate in the assembly of international cohorts of patients with rare diseases because it has alerted other researchers that there are patients in Australia with those conditions and provided a means to get in touch with the clinicians and the families to participate in that international effort. This has helped us to understand the natural history of rare conditions better and to link families with emerging therapies for rare diseases.  

Another area to highlight that is almost entirely dependent on open data sharing is the discovery of new gene–disease associations; data sharing massively accelerates gene discovery. For example, the discovery of the RNU4-2 gene a couple of years ago was made possible through large-scale data sharing; a cohort of over 100 patients was assembled within a matter of weeks. It was a groundbreaking discovery, because we think this one gene accounts for nearly 1% of all cases of intellectual disability. 

Sharing data openly has also had an impact on citations; being recognised by the international community as a contributor increases the visibility of our work. 

How do you advise early career researchers on open science best practices? 

For us, open science is the accepted way of working. Occasionally, I guess people may feel reluctant to share their work because they feel anxious about competition. My role as a senior researcher is to deal with those anxieties and instead emphasise all the benefits of being part of the international community and large-scale collaboration. Working this way just massively increases our capacity to produce world-class research. 

Are there any gaps in support or resources about open science you’d like to see addressed?  

The principal issue is infrastructure as an enabling factor. We need much more strategic planning and high-level support that extends beyond individual projects or groups, backed with investment and the enabling infrastructure to magnify the benefits of open access to data. For example, several of the datasets that we've generated over the past decade are no longer available or accessible because the funding for a particular project finished. Although the participants consented to data sharing, with the lack of infrastructure for data deposition, these data have now been lost, which has been heartbreaking to watch. 

What advice would you give to researchers considering adopting open science practices?  

"My advice is always to embrace open science and to be an active participant in the international community; that will enrich your research and also your life.” 

                                                                                                          Zornitza Stark, Victorian Clinical Genetics Services, Melbourne, Australia  

I think my advice is always to embrace open science and to be an active participant in the international community, and that will only enrich your research and also your life.  

There is much greater recognition of the importance of open science, and there is momentum: we have seen investment in large-scale projects in several countries, including the US and UK. They have created the opportunity to build some of the enabling infrastructure to create trusted research environments and develop and implement the standards that will enable data sharing. The demonstration that something is possible, and how to do it, is really important to move people forward in creating similar investments and participating together in these endeavours, and I hope will accelerate open science practices further. 

Learn more about open science and sharing research data, code and protocols & methods openly

Related content:

• Open science conversations:

1. Building trust through transparency: An open science conversation with Geir Kjetil Sandve
2. Bioinformatician Johannes Koester on embodying the spirit of open science

•  Best practices for transparency and reuse: 

1. How to share your research protocols and methods openly 

2. How to share your research code openly 

• Supporting open science practices: 

1. Why share your research data? 

2. Why sharing protocols matters 

3. Why sharing your code matters 

• Starting your career? Here’s how Springer can help you publish open access 

Don't miss the latest news and blogs, sign up to The Researcher's Source Monthly Digest! 

The 2025 State of Open Data report looks back at a decade of survey responses from researchers to see how attitudes, behaviours, and policies around open data have evolved. In this blog, we explore the impact of data sharing more personally, through individual experiences of shared data. What happens when the barriers to data sharing are overcome, and how can shared data make an impact beyond one’s own work?  

By opening and sharing their data, researchers gain more visibility and credibility for their work. When data is open, individual studies can more effectively support long-term scientific progress. Results can be verified and contribute to creating new knowledge across disciplines. 

In the 2025 State of Open Data report, we learned that researchers recognise the benefits of sharing open data, and that familiarity with FAIR principles (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability) has risen sharply. The report also highlights that researchers still face challenges around reuse, recognition, and infrastructure.  

But what does data sharing and its benefits and challenges look like in practice? While writing the 2025 report, we spoke with researchers, librarians, and data experts about open data. For this blog, we collected their real-world examples of how data sharing has shaped research and collaboration. 

From data sharing to enabling reuse at scale 

When data is openly shared, it can become a reusable resource far beyond its original purpose. Brian Nosek, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Open Science and Psychology Professor at the University of Virginia in the United States, saw this happen with his data on bias.  

Nosek developed Project Implicit in 1998 with Mazarin Bonaji and Tony Greenwald. Project Implicit was a popular website that allowed people to measure their own implicit biases, and for twenty years, more than a million people a year contributed to the project.  

“It generated enormous amounts of data that could be used for all kinds of social and behavioural research,” Nosek explains. In 2013, when he opened the Center for Open Science, the Project Implicit team suggested to add its data: “No one else has such a data source, it's totally unique.”  

Project Implicit data is shared systematically every year, and it has generated enormous numbers of cross-disciplinary research applications in epidemiology, political science, sociology, and behavioural medicine. “These things are way beyond the work that we did with implicit bias and it just wouldn't have happened without making the data available. It’s been very exciting and gratifying to see it get reused that way,” Nosek says. 

This example shows how unexpected and rich the contribution of open data can be, and why sustained availability and documentation can mean long-lasting impact.   

Connecting data to unlock new insights 

Combining datasets can create knowledge that no single dataset could deliver. Melissa Haendel PhD, FACMI, is Sarah Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor, Director of Precision Health and Translational Informatics, Deputy Director of Computational Sciences – NC Tracs, The University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine in the United States. She shares from her experience of linking and interpreting information to improve outcomes. 

Together with Chris Mungall at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and with support of international collaborators, Haendel leads the Monarch Initiative. This initiative brings a variety of different open data sources together from humans and model organisms. “Once we've integrated the data, we can use it to improve the diagnosis of patients with rare diseases, really bringing those open data resources to the point of care, and using the data to help improve the lives of patients with rare diseases,” Haendel explains.  

In another project, the All of Us Research Program aims to recruit a million participants from across the United States, from diverse races, demographics, social structures, and religion. The study collects survey data, wearable data, genomic data, and electronic health record data. At the Center for Linkage and Acquisition of Data, Haendel and colleagues link that data to a variety of other data sources.  

“Participants have agreed to share, but not all of them are able to get their data into the program,” she explains. “We've partnered with a national health information network, eHealth Exchange, to go retrieve their electronic health record, and bring it back into the system. This is the first time anybody's ever done this, and it is so exciting because we finally actually have representation of their actual data from the place where they're receiving care.” 

Haendel’s work shows that interoperability and linkage can lead to meaningful impact. When data is available to be combined, value emerges, from research to healthcare and beyond.  

From open data to real-world and societal outcomes 

An example like Haendel’s Monarch Initiative also exhibits how data sharing can directly support cultural, health, or societal outcomes. Joy Owango, Founding Director of Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa) in Kenya, illustrates how data sharing can have societal impact by supporting communities in preserving, managing, and sharing knowledge. 

The National Museum of Nigeria contacted TCC Africa because they are digitising and launching their digital library. This is a first step in data management; collect, curate, store, and share. But many questions arise: “How do you store it? Where do you store it? Now they are thinking about what kind of technology they can use to share our indigenous knowledge and protect our sovereignty. Something that acknowledges our ownership and contribution to research,” Owango explains. 

Impact is not only about citations and publications. Considerations of ethics, ownership, and trust are essential, as this experience shows.  

Catalysing collaboration and paradigm shifts 

Data sharing can lead to new collaborations and broader networks. Dawei Zhang is Deputy Director of the National Materials Corrosion and Protection Data Centre, and Professor at the School of Advanced Materials Innovation, University of Science and Technology Beijing in China. His shared data led to new and exciting collaborations that opened new research directions in the field. 

Zhang’s group was the first in the world to use AI models to process data obtained by a corrosion sensor in a typical atmospheric environment in China. The results showed that the combination of high-throughput corrosion data and AI models could help understand and even predict how materials can degrade.  

“A leading Croatian scientist in Belgium asked if we could share the data,” Zhang shares. “At that time only a minority of people wanted to believe that this data-driven machine learning model, which we often call black boxes, could lead to something that is really transformative. By using the data we shared, they not only published several very important works, but also helped us broaden our impact and extend the collaboration to many other countries,” Zhang explains.  

These collaborators from different countries are now driving the transformation of the entire corrosion research paradigm. Zhang’s experience exemplifies how sharing data can lead to collaboration, which can accelerate new insights, paradigm shifts, and scientific development.  

From data shared to data reused: What your data needs to create impact 

The 2025 State of Open Data report shows that the foundations for open data are in place. They should be strengthened and supported to make data sharing the standard across the research community. The impact stories above are just a few examples from across disciplines around the globe, that illustrate how meaningful intentional sharing can be providing data are curated, documented, and well-governed. As we’ve seen in the 2025 State of Open Data report, and as amplified in these stories, openness alone is not enough.  

Making shared data count is not only about making it available, but ensuring it can be reused in meaningful ways. Infrastructures, standards, and services are required to enable data to travel across geographical locations and scientific disciplines to deliver more impact.  

These impact stories illustrate what is possible when openness is combined with intention and purpose. If your work generates high-quality data, share it to create your own impact story. Turn your work into a resource that can drive reuse, collaboration, and long-term impact.  

Get resources and support to share your data openly in Springer Nature’s Open Science hub, and explore the 2025 State of Open Data report to learn more about global attitudes towards open data.  

Related content

• Supporting open science practices: Why share your research data? 
• Open data sharing: What a decade of researcher insights tells us Starting your career?
• Starting your career? Here’s how Springer can help you publish open access 

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You know Springer as a trusted name, trust that is nearly two decades in the making. Springer’s reputation is rooted in a habit of adaptation to an ever-evolving research landscape, to support its research communities to do their best work. When this work is shared and communicated effectively, it inspires change, fosters collaboration, and drives action.

Here’s a glimpse into how Springer’s legacy took shape, and how its adaptive, forward-looking approach reflected in its response to major shifts in scholarly communication, like digitalisation and open access. And most importantly, how this legacy continues to guide our work today.

“Within the Springer Nature family, each member serves researchers in its distinct way, always underpinned by trusted scholarship. With its long publishing heritage, Springer brings a particularly strong combination of global reach and discoverability, rigorous editorial and integrity standards, and guidance and support throughout the publication journey.”

Nearly two centuries of scholarly communication have passed since Julius Springer founded a small publishing house in Berlin in 1842. Springer has been growing alongside the development of modern research, adapting to its evolution, and responding to the changing needs to its research communities.

Your work is shaped by your research community and field, and by the methods, standards, practices, and tools that you use. As these evolve, so do expectations around how research is produced, validated, and shared. To best support researchers, Springer evolves and adapts as well. Working closely with research communities, it innovates to accommodate the evolving landscape, while always remaining grounded in integrity and rigour.

“Working with Springer has enlarged my own visibility, because Springer is a renowned publisher and has a wide readership in those areas in which I publish, which increases my own visibility.” 

- Dr. Bernice Bovenkerk, author of Beyond Natural, Normal, Necessary, Nice: Introducing ‘Neglectable’ as a Distinct Coping Strategy for the Dairy Paradox (2026)

Springer today: A legacy of trust for your research

To publish your best work and reach a broad audience, you need a publisher you can trust. Springer’s long legacy of excellence is what makes it the trusted publisher you know today.

Springer has a broad disciplinary reach, spanning science, technology, medicine, humanities, and social sciences. You’ll find cutting-edge science as well as foundational work, in formats ranging from journals and books to reference works and more, designed to serve the various needs of the research community. With its portfolio of over 2,700 journals and over 220,000 books, Springer publishes the trusted content that serves as the foundation for research and development. And it empowers authors to share impactful research.

Over time, books and articles can do more than record results. They help define fields, connect within and between communities, and support the development of your work and of research beyond your field. Springer supports this long-term value by adapting alongside authors and editors to the evolving landscape of scholarly publishing. Springer’s adaptive, forward-looking approach is reflected in how it responded to two major shifts in scholarly communication over recent decades: digitalisation and open access.

“A benefit for the authors, in the first place, is the reputation of Springer. It’s attractive to have an article in a Springer journal, because Springer is a good publisher, obviously.”     

- Marc de Vries, author of Storybook driven design for enhancing spatial ability in early childhood: a lesson study approach (2026)

Forward-looking innovation: At the forefront of globalisation and digitalisation

The modest Springer publishing house grew alongside the internationalisation of science. Knowledge advances fast when researchers engage across borders, and Springer was there to support the global circulation of ideas, which required trusted editorial processes in an international scale. Research needed more than just wider distribution, but also meaningful connections.

Digitalisation expanded this process of connecting and delivering research. Springer’s early embrace of digital publishing was a natural extension of its legacy of excellence and rigour, combined with an innovative spirit.

Digital publishing makes it easier for your work to be discovered, accessed, and connected to related research. Springer’s early investment in digital infrastructure made more than a century and a half of scholarly publications available to study and explore. This digitalisation underscored Springer’s commitment to supporting researchers as they navigate an increasingly digital, networked environment.

“At the Springer publication European Journal for Philosophy of Science, we try to give space for non-mainstream voices. We also try to make the refereeing process as fair and transparent as possible, especially to younger researchers who may be less acquainted with what happens behind the scenes.”

- Federica Russo, Co-Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal for Philosophy of Science

Open access: Making research more accessible than ever

Springer has always played a significant role in shaping new publishing models, particularly open access. The same adaptive mindset that has always guided Springer also shaped its proactive and leading response to the advent of open access.

As expectations around access, funding, and transparency in research began to change, Springer expanded new publishing models that supported wider dissemination while maintaining established editorial standards. The development of open access journals and books reflected an understanding that research communities differ in their needs, and that sustainable routes to openness require flexibility rather than uniform solutions.

Open access is another chapter in Springer’s robust legacy, which continues its longstanding mission to support research communities navigate the publishing and research landscapes, and ensure research can reach the audiences who can make it meaningful by building on it or putting it into practice.

Research now moves faster, crosses disciplines more readily, and is expected to address increasingly complex global challenges. Springer evolves alongside it, always helping experts publish their work and helping others find it. While tools, platforms, and publishing models may change, Springer’s underlying commitment remains the same as it was in 1842: to support research communities in turning knowledge into insight and action.

Explore the benefits of publishing your next journal article or book with Springer. Get practical tools, expert insights, and tailored resources to help you navigate the process with confidence and clarity.

Related Content

• Starting your career? Here’s how Springer can help you publish open access · The story of Springer’s first open access book
• The story of Springer’s first open access book

This article was originally published in 2021 and was last updated in April 2026.

This is the second part in our blog series looking at the value that publishers add for open access book authors (find part 1 here, which looks at quality assurance, the editorial process and publisher prestige).

How publishers help your open access book go further

If you publish an open access book through an academic publisher or press, you will have access to more services, distribution channels and marketing support than if you were to self-publish.

At Springer Nature, our open access books all have their own International Standard Book Number (ISBN) for both the eBook and the print copy enabling readers to buy the book, as well as a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) on a book and chapter level. DOIs are persistent interoperable identifiers used on digital networks, which support the discovery, sale and analysis of your book and chapters.

In addition to print, our open access books are available online as HTML, PDF and ePub from our publishing platform Springer Nature Link, and through other platforms and indexers we partner with such as Google Books. MOBI is also available through Amazon. This variety of formats removes barriers by allowing readers to read your work on any device.

Dissemination, discoverability and preservation

We know that open access book authors want to reach a wider and broader audience, so dissemination and discoverability are crucial in getting your work out there and making it easier to find.

Some publishers host publications on their own platforms. Springer Nature’s publishing platform, Springer Nature Link, receives 24 million readers per month, guaranteeing a wide audience for your work.

In addition to Springer Nature Link, we work with partners such as Web of Science, Scopus and the OAPEN Library, plus all of our open access books are listed in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and, where appropriate, PubMed’s NCBI Bookshelf. Inclusion on these sites enhances the visibility and discoverability of your open access book.

Our open access books are also automatically included in our eBook Collections at no additional charge to ensure maximum distribution. Our existing relationship with libraries and booksellers means that your open access book will reach our millions of customers around the world. By assigning a Creative Commons (CC) licence, this gives readers a clear indication of how they can use your book.

We endeavour to ensure that all content remains accessible and usable to our readers, regardless of media failure and technological change. As such, we work with digital preservation organisations such as CLOCKSS and Portico to ensure the long-term survival of web-based scholarly publications for the benefit of the global research community.

Marketing and activities

Perhaps one of the most highly valued services that a publisher can provide is the marketing and promotion of your work. However, not all open access book publishers include marketing support in the services that they provide to authors. If self-publishing, the absence of this service can be a major disadvantage alongside the extra labour involved on the author’s side to get the book created.

At Springer Nature, our open access books are marketed in the same way as our non-open access books, to make sure that they reach the greatest number and widest range of readers. Our global and expert marketing teams employ an effective mix of marketing activities.

1. Search engine optimisation
   Each book has its own homepage on our website with its own downloadable promotional flyer. To ensure that relevant content appears at the top of the results list of an appropriate keyword search, we constantly optimise our product pages. 
2. Newsletters and alerts
   To stay up-to-date, many of our readers and library customers have registered for subject-specific email newsletters and new book alerts for customised information such as highlighted books.
3. Social media
   Our social media accounts are subject-specific and interest group focused, allowing us to connect with new and existing audiences. To keep them informed and engaged, we promote conferences and run special campaigns.
4. Conferences
   We present a selection of recent books at scientific conferences and we promote more books in our conference-specific catalogues, newsletters and on dedicated web pages.
5. Highlight campaigns
   Thematic collections are curated to further increase the discoverability of our publications and help surface some of the most pressing topics. Examples include the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and open access books publishing. These campaigns are promoted across multiple channels, targeting readers interested in their content.

Of course, your own network and connections are invaluable too, so we encourage you to reach out to them directly. We have some tips and tools to help you spread the word about your book.

The impact of our open access books is tracked through usage statistics which you can find on Springer Nature Link, showing the number of chapter downloads, citations and Altmetric mentions. Our open access books receive on average 10 times more downloads, 2.4 times more citations and 10 times more online mentions than our non-open access books, and reach 61% more countries  increasing the global diversity of your readership.

Have maximum confidence in, and visibility for, your open access book

The OAPEN Open Access Books toolkit, an independent free author resource, suggests that if your goal is to publish sound science or reputable research, you should choose a publisher that will give your readers the confidence that your research is academically sound. Self-publishing does not always offer this.

An open access book means more than just “free to read” - it needs a proper licence, quality assurance and effective distribution and marketing methods to ensure it reaches your intended audience.

By offering an open access option to book authors, we are giving you the freedom to choose the right publishing method most suited to your needs.

Interested in experiencing the benefits of open access publishing? Visit our open access books hub to learn more about how it all works, or get in touch with a Springer, Palgrave, or Apress publishing editor with your idea.

Related content

• Demystifying the publishing process: What value do open access book publishers add? Part 1
• Navigating open access book publishing with the OAPEN Toolkit
• Starting your career? Here’s how Springer can help you publish open access
• The story of Springer’s first open access book

How do researchers perceive fairness and bias across the scholarly publishing landscape? And how do these perceptions impact their publishing behaviour? 

Our recent report analyses responses from over 8,000 researchers globally to better understand their views across the scholarly publishing landscape as a whole. In this blog, we discuss the report’s key findings, and explore some of the strategies we use to address perceived bias and encourage fairness in the publishing process at Springer

Nature.

Science and research are often seen as domains governed by impartial standards, where methods, execution, and evaluation are grounded in established research standards. As a key stage in the research lifecycle, scholarly publishing is likewise expected to assess research primarily on its quality.  

Yet researchers’ experiences suggest a more complex reality. Bias is widely perceived to be present globally across scholarly publishing. It remains underdiscussed but widely felt, and shapes researchers’ trust, behaviour, and decisions about where and how to publish. 

Our survey asked researchers about their perceptions of fairness and bias in scholarly publishing, so that we can better understand and address them. We received responses from researchers worldwide representing various regions, disciplines, career stages, and publishing experiences across the scholarly publishing landscape. 

The findings from the survey were recently published in the report titled ‘Perceptions of fairness and bias in the scholarly publishing ecosystem: a global survey' They highlight both structural challenges and practical expectations researchers have of publishers, editors, and reviewers. 

Understanding perceptions of bias in scholarly publishing  

Bias is widely perceived to exist across scholarly publishing, according to the report. 91% of surveyed researchers believe there is some degree of bias in academic publishing. And 84% of respondents say they have experienced bias in some way during the publishing process. 

Country-related bias is the most prevalent type of bias researchers believe to exist in publishing (62%), followed by institutional affiliation bias (56%) and professional network bias (55%). Common experiences of bias include rejection followed by similar papers being published (42%), lack of appreciation for regional significance of research (29%), and reviewer comments focusing on language skills rather than on the research itself (25%). 

Figure 2 from the report: Types of perceived bias

Figure 4 from the report: Indicators of individual experiences of bias

How bias influences researchers’ publishing decisions  

The report finds that 72% of researchers consider the possibility of bias when deciding where to submit their work for publication. 45% say the possibility of bias significantly influences their decisions, and 30% say they’ve decided to not submit to a journal again after having experienced perceived bias.  

This means that researchers’ perceptions of bias influence where they choose to publish. They evaluate various indicators to assess a journal’s potential bias before submitting their manuscript. Beyond their own bias experience with a specific journal and that of their colleagues, many authors will also consider the types of articles published, the diversity of authors and editorial boards, and the the acceptance rates for authors from their region.  

Researchers also report actively using strategies to reduce potential bias against their manuscript. These range from collaboration with senior researchers, researchers from prestigious institutions or countries likely to be accepted, or utilising writing or language services.  

Addressing bias: What researchers expect publishers to do 

The survey shows strong consensus that publishers have both the responsibility and agency to address bias in the publication process. 91% of researchers expect clear policies and systems to address bias, and 62% expect procedures to investigate instances of bias. 

Researchers’ perceptions of the stages in the publication process when bias occurs explains their expectations from publishers to address bias. Respondents identify the initial editorial assessment and decision about whether to send a manuscript out for peer review (71%) and the peer review process itself (64%) as stages where bias primarily occurs. 

Editors indeed have a key role in the publication process, and most respondents want more training for editors, to support them in recognising, managing, and mitigating bias. Over half of respondents want greater visibility into editorial decision processes, as well as more prioritisation of scientific content over language. 

A little over half of researchers feel that reviewers should be provided with guidelines on how to minimise bias in peer review. Respondents consider transparency and anonymisation as ways to potentially reduce bias due to affiliation, gender, or region. And of course, targeted training on delivering constructive, bias-free feedback is considered essential. 

Addressing bias: Springer Nature’s efforts to minimise bias  

To tackle the problem of bias and support fairness in the publication process, publishers across academic publishing need to understand how researchers perceive bias and address their concerns. Indeed, 91% of survey respondents expect publishers to have clear policies and systems to address bias.  

Addressing bias requires more than intent; our efforts concentrate on practical mechanisms that shape decision-making. Because publishing decisions are made by people, training has a critical role in addressing bias. It helps individuals recognise unconscious assumptions, reflect on their decision-making, and avoid practices that may unintentionally reinforce bias. This is essential given what our survey shows us about the impact of perceived bias on researchers’ trust and publishing choices.  

In addition to training, practical mechanisms influence decisions at scale. They can help reduce bias by shaping how decisions are made using clear criteria, transparency, and structured workflows that reduce the reliance on individual judgement.  

Our efforts to reduce bias and encourage fairness in the publishing process at Springer Nature include:  

• Training We’ve been offering implicit bias training for book and journal editors since 2024. The training examines how implicit bias can surface across the publication journey, including content acquisition, peer reviewer selection, editorial appointments, and portfolio management, and offers practical suggestions for countering bias. Additional trainings include Nature Masterclasses on peer review, research integrity training for editors and authors, and more.  
• Increase transparency To support increased transparency, which may help to counter perceptions of bias, we expanded our use of transparent peer review to provide greater insight into the decision-making process. Transparent peer review is now available across all Nature family journals and the BMC Series journals. 
• Diversifying editorial teams We are working to increase the regional diversity of our external academic editors to better reflect the global diversity of the research landscape. 
• Language support We support authors with language-focused services. 

Towards a more robust research ecosystem 

Bias is challenging to prove empirically, but researchers’ perceptions of it have consequences, and they impact their publishing choices.  

Fairness, transparency, and inclusion are not abstract principles for us. We work to achieve and strengthen them throughout the publishing process at Springer Nature. The survey and report on researchers’ perceptions of fairness and bias help us in our efforts to contribute to a more robust and inclusive global research ecosystem for all.  

Explore the full report to learn more about how researchers like you perceive fairness in scholarly publishing, and how Springer Nature is acting on those insights.  

Related content: 

Report: Perceptions of fairness and bias in the scholarly publishing ecosystem: a global survey 

Blog: How we work to promote inclusive practices in book publishing 

Report: Inclusive book publishing at Springer Nature 

Blog: The benefits of inclusive publishing and why we need more inclusive journals 

Blog: How do you determine the value of a journal? Journal value beyond rankings 

White paper: Demonstrating journal value beyond rankings 

Blog: The value of null results: How Discover champions inclusive science 

White paper: The state of null results: Insights from 11,000 researchers on negative or inconclusive results 

Resources & Tools: Global Inclusion in Research Publishing 

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If you’re an early-career researcher (ECR), publishing open access can sometimes feel daunting, especially when it comes to understanding fees, funding, and the different open access models used across the publishing landscape. In fact, many ECRs are simply unaware that their institution may already have support in place to help cover open access publishing costs. In this guide, we’ll explain the essentials and show you how to quickly check whether your open access fees could be covered.

Last year, we celebrated 25 years of publishing high-quality, widely accessible research through BMC (formerly known as BioMed Central). Since we launched, our mission has remained the same: to pioneer openly available research and support authors at every career stage through every step of the publishing journey. This blog article explores how publishing in our fully open access (OA) journals shares your work with BMC’s 6 million monthly readers, as well as exploring your funding options.

Pioneering OA publishing

In 2000, BMC (then BioMed Central) made high quality research open to every reader – and in making the open access model sustainable, we changed the world of academic publishing.  

Since then, we’ve anticipated many open science trends that are now industry standards; we’ve introduced transparent peer-review processes across a wide range of titles; and we’ve encouraged authors to publish a variety of article types, including datasets and methodologies, to support the reproducibility of their research.  

Funders, research institutes, and governments are increasingly calling for OA publishing, and we continue to fully support the mission to make knowledge sharing more equitable. OA articles have no paywalls, allowing anyone, anywhere to access, read, and cite the latest scientific advances. We believe that OA has a crucial role in addressing current and future global challenges by ensuring that peer-reviewed knowledge reaches the widest possible audience.  

BMC’s portfolio now spans more than 300 fully OA journals across 16 disciplines. Explore the full portfolio of BMC journals. 

Watch the video to explore how we are advancing open, trusted, and community-led science for the future. 

Why publish OA with BMC?

Our publishing model is guided by four key tenets:

• Trust: Our monthly readership of 6 million demonstrates that the research community trusts our publications. We care about quality research, and we were one of the first publishers to have a dedicated scientific integrity team. All our editors are carefully selected and trained.  

• Community: Our diverse community of more than 20,000 editorial board members will guide your research through the peer-review process. They play an essential role in helping shape the vision of the journals in our portfolio and representing researchers globally.  

• Support: We’ll be with you at every step of the publishing journey. We’ll help you find the right home for your research. And once you’ve chosen a journal and submitted your article, we’ll provide personal feedback and ensure that the peer-review process is both rigorous and constructive.  

• Inclusivity: We offer a home to all robust research. By including datasets and null results, we help researchers avoid collecting the same data twice or repeating experiments that have already been done and led to negative results.

Together, these principles are designed to make publishing open access feel more transparent and supportive, especially for researchers early in their careers who are navigating the process for the first time.  

Learn more about the benefits of publishing open access, including increased citation and usage. 

"The whole process was researcher-centred and there was high cooperation between the editorial team and the authors.” 

– Author, BMC Medical Education

BMC open access funding options

Navigating different OA models can be tiring, so we ensure that our process is as smooth and transparent as possible for researchers at all career stages.  

Our article processing charge (APC) covers all the work involved in getting your manuscript into top shape before publication; managing the peer-review process; proofreading and lay-outing your article; and ensuring that it reaches a wide audience.  

A full list of the APCs for all our journals is easily accessible on our dedicated BMC website. Once your manuscript is accepted, the APC can be paid by your funder, your institution, your employer, or yourself.  

If your institution has a funding agreement in place with Springer Nature, part or all of the APC could already be covered. This is a key point for ECRs: in many cases, your university or institution may already have an open access agreement that covers your fees, but you won’t know until you check.

"The manuscript handling process was very careful yet also very swift. The reviewers' comments were precise and valuable.” 

– Author, Stem Cell Research & Therapy

How to find out whether your APC is covered by an OA agreement

Step 1: Go to the homepage of your journal of choice and click on ‘Explore open access funding’ underneath the ‘Submit your manuscript’ button.  

Step 2: Institutions are pre-filled based on your IP address, but you can update this to reflect your best fit or that of your co-authors.  

Step 3: If your university or institution has an agreement with Springer Nature, the eligibility checker will let you know your funding options.  

Tip: If you’re unsure which institution to select (for example, if you have multiple affiliations or international co-authors), try checking each relevant affiliation to see what funding options apply.

Our four-step process for publishing your research with BMC

• Submission: Once you’ve chosen the right BMC journal for your work, you can submit your manuscript online. The first step is to navigate to the journal’s website, click ‘Submission guidelines’, and check whether your article meets the formatting and content requirements. When it’s ready to go, click the ‘Submit manuscript’ button.  

• Peer review: Once your manuscript has been received, if appropriate for the journal, peer reviewers will rigorously evaluate it, assessing the validity of the work, and for our selective journals, the significance of the research. You may be required to make revisions based on their feedback.  

• Acceptance and publication: Once accepted, your manuscript will be prepared for publication. This is the time when you’ll be charged the APC fee, unless it is already covered through an institutional agreement. We will also add relevant metadata to make sure your article can be discovered easily by those it could benefit. The final article will then be published online and made freely accessible.  

• Post-publication: After publication, you can track the impact of your work through metrics such as downloads, citations, and social-media mentions. We will provide tools and support to help you maximize the visibility of your research.

Building an equitable future

We remain committed to being a trusted partner for our authors and readers; providing a platform that reaches millions of readers; championing inclusive publishing; and building a diverse community of contributors who feel supported.  

For early-career researchers, this means not only having a rigorous publishing home for your work, but also clearer routes to open access — including funding support through open access agreements where available.

If you’re interested in joining us to advance openness, transparency, and quality in community-led research, you can find out more about open access funding options with BMC.

Related Content:

• Discover journals: Open access funding options for our authors 

• Starting your career? Here’s how Springer can help you publish open access 

• Publishing to a collection: Impact for Early Career Researchers

• The open access advantage: Real stories from multidisciplinary Scientific Reports authors

Pharmaceutical organisations increasingly recognise that inclusion is essential for innovation, workforce resilience, and robust scientific decision-making. Information professionals play a pivotal role in this, operating at the intersection of people, knowledge and systems. Through their work, they influence how scientific communities connect, how information is shared, and how equitable practices take root.

Our conversation with Dr. Shae Taylor offers a clear view of the challenges women encounter in biopharma and highlights how thoughtful information practices can strengthen participation and visibility across the sector. 

Introducing Dr. Shae Taylor 

Dr. Shae Taylor’s career reflects a rare combination of scientific depth, technical expertise, and sustained advocacy for women in STEM. With dual degrees in biology and chemistry, she began her career as an analytical chemist before moving into engineering roles and, later, marketing. 

In 2000, she joined Agilent Technologies as a field service engineer specialising in liquid chromatography at a time when only 3 per cent of Agilent’s US field service engineers were women. Alongside her technical work, Taylor became an active leader in the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), heading the SWE@Agilent Employee Network Group, the organisation’s first employee network and for many years its only women‑focused group. 

Today, as North American Marketing Program Manager at Agilent, Taylor draws on a broad perspective shaped by scientific practice, engineering, advocacy, and customer engagement. Her book, Women in Biopharma, part of the Women in Engineering and Science series, documents the professional journeys of women across the global biopharmaceutical industry. 

The spark behind Women in Biopharma 

The idea for the book emerged at a Society of Women Engineers conference, where series editor Jill S. Tietjen led a session on the overlooked contributions of women in STEM. The discussion highlighted how many foundational scientific achievements were made by women whose work has not been widely recognised.

The session struck a chord with Taylor, who saw a clear gap in the Women in Engineering and Science series. Even as biopharma expanded and diversified, there was no volume highlighting the women shaping the field. Given her close work with biopharma customers, Taylor knew she was in a strong position to address this.

What women in biopharma are experiencing today

Across interviews with contributors from around the world, several themes emerged.

• Persistent hurdles: Women face challenges at each career stage, from early‑career isolation to mid-career caregiving responsibilities and late‑career support for ageing parents. These experiences reflect broader patterns observed across the sciences, where belonging and representation strongly influence retention.
• Perseverance and adaptability: Despite varied paths, each woman spoke about the need to adapt and persevere in a rapidly changing industry.
• Structural instability: Volatility caused by mergers, acquisitions, and the dynamics of early‑stage biopharma makes adaptability essential.

“Everyone…encountered hurdles and difficult situations… but none of them let them stop them.”

One story that stayed with Taylor was Isadora’s. She immigrated from Brazil at 17 and faced deep loneliness as she tried to build a life without a community around her. Instead of accepting isolation, she created the support network she wished she had, only to discover how many others were searching for the same thing. She met countless people, men and women alike, who were struggling in similar ways. By bringing them together, she built a space where people could support and encourage one another. As Taylor put it, “She created her own group… and quickly found out she wasn’t the only one.”

Digital transformation: opportunity and risk

With AI and automation reshaping drug discovery, workflow optimisation, and scientific analysis, Taylor emphasises that inclusion must be embedded early in digital transformation.

Her team demonstrated this through an experiment using AI‑generated headshots produced from identical prompts. Results varied dramatically, demonstrating inconsistencies in how people from different demographic groups were represented. As Taylor observes, individuals from underrepresented groups are often the least accurately depicted.

These observations highlight key responsibilities for information managers:

• AI-driven tools must be evaluated for representational fairness.
• Metadata, training sets, and algorithmic outputs require scrutiny.
• Diverse contributors must be involved in system design and governance.

This mirrors broader discussions on how institutions can build more equitable research environments by making it safer to report discrimination, improving support for underrepresented groups and taking deliberate action to improve workplace culture.

Underrepresentation in biopharma

Many girls grow up loving science, mixing things, building things, experimenting and asking questions. But as they reach their preteen years, the cultural messages around them often change. STEM stops being seen as something for everyone and starts being coded as something “for boys.” Taylor says this early loss of belonging is one of the first barriers we need to tackle. Keeping girls engaged means showing, clearly and consistently, that science and technology are not limited to one gender. It also means helping them understand the full range of STEM careers. As she points out, areas like law, policy and regulatory affairs, featured in Women in Biopharma, are essential to the biopharma sector, yet young women rarely recognise them as STEM pathways. Sharing this broader view early can help more girls imagine themselves in the field.

Why women leave and what organisations can do

One of Taylor’s most striking findings is that more than one‑third of women leave STEM roles within five years of graduating. The reasons are complex, but several themes recur:

• Lack of flexibility, especially for those balancing childcare and eldercare.
• Pay inequity, which undermines long-term career confidence.
• Limited visibility of women in senior leadership, with only around 13% of STEM sector CEOs being women.
• Insufficient support systems, particularly for mid-career and late-career caregiving responsibilities. “We need to switch from parental leave to family leave… across your entire career.”

How information professionals can advance equity

Taylor identifies librarians and information professionals as important enablers of progress. They can:

• Provide flexible access to digital resources to support flexible working.
• Use knowledge‑sharing platforms to highlight and amplify women’s contributions.
• Model inclusive practice through equitable curation, presentation and promotion of content.
• Curate resources that showcase women’s achievements in science and biopharma.
• Ensure access to books, case studies and development materials, including the Women in Engineering and Science series.
• Create safe physical or virtual spaces for networking, mentoring and community building, helping women form supportive communities.

Together, these actions help build a stronger sense of representation and belonging, especially for early‑career researchers who are just beginning their journey in science and often depend on inclusive, supportive environments to grow.

Women in biopharma: A new era of leadership

Taylor’s reflections, and the stories captured in Women in Biopharma, show a sector full of potential, shaped by challenges but also by a new wave of confidence. Young women today are entering STEM ready to break ceilings and define success on their own terms. As Taylor notes:

“Young women today have so much confidence. I'm blown away by it. They want to buck tradition. They want to break that ceiling and achieve success on their own terms, both at work and in their personal lives. And they're rewriting the narrative of what it looks like to be a woman in biopharma.”

For organisations, especially those managing information ecosystems, this creates a clear opportunity. Equitable access to knowledge, inclusive digital transformation, and the amplification of diverse voices directly influence who feels seen, supported, and able to thrive. Information professionals play a pivotal role here: making women’s contributions visible, curating resources that broaden representation, and creating spaces where community and mentorship can grow.

This is exactly what Women in Biopharma, part of the Women in Engineering and Science series, aims to reinforce. By highlighting the experiences and leadership of women across the sector, it not only documents progress but inspires the next generation to see themselves in biopharma’s future. With intentional information practices, that future becomes one where women don’t just enter the field, they help define its direction.

To explore more resources that inform, inspire, and drive new thinking across the research community, visit our Trusted Research hub. It’s a great place to dive deeper into the books, journals and tools that support equitable access to knowledge and shape the future of scientific discovery.

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Welcome to a new series of blog posts, where researchers share their experiences of open science practices and the impact that sharing open data, code or protocols can have. 

Geir Kjetil Sandve is Professor of Scientific Computing and Machine Learning at the University of Oslo in Oslo, Norway. He develops machine learning methods for life sciences and public health, with recent work focusing on climate-sensitive disease prediction. As a senior researcher, Professor Sandve has extensive publishing, teaching, and supervision experience, with articles in journals such as Nature Machine Intelligence, including Improving generalization of machine learning-identified biomarkers using causal modelling with examples from immune receptor diagnostics and The immuneML ecosystem for machine learning analysis of adaptive immune receptor repertoires.  

We asked Professor Sandve to share his experiences of open science practices and the impact that sharing open code can have on public health and research in the age of deep learning. 

Can you briefly introduce yourself and your research area?  

I do research within machine learning, and often I do methodological research which is very tightly inspired by real-use cases. I try to always base my new methodological projects on some concrete need. I have worked in life sciences for 20 years in machine learning; I first worked in genomics, then pharmacoepidemiology, and, for some years, quite intensely with immune receptors, like adaptive immune cells and how they recognise foreign threats. Most recently, I'm spending most of my time on how climate change is affecting health, such as machine learning for malaria and dengue fever, and predicting outbreaks ahead of time. 

How did you first become interested in open science practices?  

I think it was during my PhD, where we published quite a bit in the BMC series, including BMC Bioinformatics and Genome Biology, which published open access articles. I liked that for two reasons. As a computer science researcher, it’s not just about whether you can find a paper in the end but how quickly you can browse and navigate papers. Even though we had access to most of the papers we needed in my PhD, the open access ones were more convenient. That was my entry point. 

For open software, that was more on transparency. I could see that when anything was open science, it was much easier to double-check if things had been done correctly and feel reassured that I could trust the paper in detail. Also, it's much easier to build further on. In my PhD, I spent most of my time on preparation and boilerplate aspects. When I went in a more open software direction, where I tried to create open science projects that were built on open software, I could focus more on new ideas using the context of existing work. 

What motivated you to adopt open science practices?  

I went into research a bit of an idealist. I think it's quite a tough sector to be in, so I feel we have to find motivation in some ideals of science. One is that if I do something, I want it to be as helpful to others as possible. I want others to be able to build on what I've done. The second is trust. In science, we shouldn't be forced to trust people. We should instead always be open to check each other’s work. 

You’re never 100% proud of your research code. You always know that if you had unlimited time, you would make it even better. Allowing yourself to share it and say, ‘Okay, this is what I had time for,’ and being able to trust that you’ve made the right prioritisations is important. If you have done something wrong, there is a big chance that somebody will catch it. 

Have you ever faced any particular challenges or barriers in undertaking open science practices?  

Data sensitivity is one challenge, but another big challenge is the computational cost of ensuring reproducibility, especially when analyses are run frequently. We have practises to ensure transparency, reproducibility, and unbiasedness of results, but if you want to go into deep learning, you simply cannot do them realistically based on computational budgets. I think we are entering a phase where sometimes computation is so intense and demanding that we have to sacrifice a bit of this transparency and reproducibility in order save computational time.  

Also, it’s one thing to share code, but for it to be valuable, people need to be able to run it. That is becoming harder, as it may depend on particular GPUs or system setups. It may also sometimes rely on closed models from large commercial companies or require access to computing centres that are not openly available. I think they are the main challenges we face in the machine learning community specifically. 

Is there a particular success story or example you’re proud of that illustrates the benefits of open science?  

“For researchers from smaller institutions, open science is crucial for being part of a broad international community beyond their own office.”

Geir Kjetil Sandve, Professor of Scientific Computing and Machine Learning, University of Oslo, Norway 

We have one ongoing project that is not yet academically published, but it has already had an impact. I’m collaborating with the HISP Centre to develop DHIS2, which is the world’s largest open-source health information system. It is used as the national health information system in around 70 countries, where vaccination data, medicine stocks, tuberculosis outbreaks, and other health indicators are tracked.  

I’ve worked with them for three years to develop machine learning methodologies to predict climate-sensitive disease outbreaks. While there are many open-source models for early warning systems, we are trying to build a platform that enables such models to be used operationally, as that can be quite challenging in practice. We are building an open community where everything is open source and where we share our ambitions and ideas transparently. The goal is to bring the community together so countries can retain control over the models and how they are used, make informed decisions, build local capacity, and communicate effectively with governments to ensure real-world impact. 

It has been fascinating to me because it goes beyond publishing open access papers or open-source code. It requires an open development cycle, where we contribute core software platform technologies to a shared community and develop them collaboratively. 

Another point is that open science is also a way of contributing to capacity building. For researchers from smaller institutions, open science (its processes, networks, software, and publications) is crucial for being part of a broad international community beyond their own office. 

Have open science practices influenced your career progression? 

Yes, I think so. When I was hired for my permanent position, they wanted someone who could interact with existing research. I was able to say that I bring with me a lot of open and still actively developing code that others can contribute to. This is better for students as they can contribute to open-source code, which facilitates collaboration and interaction with the research environment. Open science practices have also increased the impact of my work. Several people have been inspired by the code I've made, and I have gotten collaborations both nationally and internationally based on it. 

What advice would you give to researchers considering adopting open science practices?  

“Open science is a way of thinking about science and work that makes it feel meaningful and easier to stay motivated in the long run.” 

Geir Kjetil Sandve, Professor of Scientific Computing and Machine Learning, University of Oslo, Norway 

It is completely worth it. I think you gain so much by going in this direction. If you see it as a community and become conscious of your strengths and weaknesses, it will open so many collaboration and learning opportunities. Open science is a way of thinking about science and work that makes it feel meaningful and easier to stay motivated in the long run. 

I feel the point of open science is that work should be possible to reproduce or reuse in practice. To me, open science is not about whether it’s theoretically possible with unlimited time to build on something but about ensuring it’s open in a way that actually invites reuse, transparency, and reproducibility. Sharing code without putting yourself in others’ shoes and considering how it might realistically be reused is not truly in the spirit of open science. It's not about checking a box; it's about actually contributing.

Learn more about open science and sharing research data, code and protocols & methods openly 

Geir Kjetil Sandve, PhD, Professor of Scientific Computing and Machine Learning, University of Oslo, Norway 

Geir Kjetil Sandve studied computer science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). During his PhD, he surveyed, benchmarked and developed machine learning methodology for motif discovery in biosequences. For his postdoctoral studies at the University of Oslo, Norway, he broadened his understanding of statistics, collaborating with biologists and statisticians to pioneer statistical analysis of genomic co-localization. Currently, his main focus is on doing his part to help make our research environment fun but productive, brutally honest but supportive, and visionary while delivering on our promise.

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2. Bioinformatician Johannes Koester on embodying the spirit of open science

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1. How to share your research protocols and methods openly 

2. How to share your research code openly 

• Supporting open science practices:

1. Why share your research data

2. Why sharing protocols matters 

3. Why sharing your code matters 

• Starting your career? Here’s how Springer can help you publish open access  

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Join us for a look behind the scenes of Springer Nature collections in a special blog series. In today’s blog, Kun Yu, Director of Collections Management and Acquisition, explains how Springer Nature collections safeguard integrity, and why this is so important for the researchers who publish in them. From rigorous guest editor vetting to data-driven topic-picks align, when you publish in a Springer Nature collection, both your work and your reputation benefit, and you also get networking opportunities.

In 2022, Springer Nature launched its Collections Management and Acquisition (CMA) team to drive the growth of high-quality articles via topical collections. Since then, I've been leading this team through the creation of high-quality collections through Springer Nature’s journals, from BMC and Nature to Discover and Springer. These collections are developed based on trusted relationships we’ve built with the global research community. 

Our CMA team oversees collections published across Springer Nature journals, from BMC and Nature to Discover and Springer. By building trusted relationships with researchers worldwide, the team curates’ high quality, topical collections that showcase impactful work.

Delivering trustworthy collection content is our top priority

Collections provide an excellent home for your research because they bring your findings to highly engaged audiences, increase visibility within your field, and place your work alongside other rigorously selected articles. Maintaining the integrity of every collection is therefore essential. It ensures that your research gains the maximum benefit.

Prefer the highlights? Watch the short video below for a quick summary of how we safeguard integrity in our collections.

The difference between collections and journals

Collections are an effective way to group research papers focused on a specific topic and attract relevant and engaged readership interested in the themes or methods covered by the collection. Unlike a journal, a collection is not a standalone publication with its own aims-and-scope and editorial board; instead, it is a curated grouping of articles published within an existing journal (or across multiple journals), brought together under a shared theme to make it easier for readers to discover connected work in one place. 

The benefits of publishing to a Springer Nature collection 

When researchers publish in a Springer Nature collection, their work can enjoy greater visibility and a broader audience because it is surfaced to readers actively following that topic area. And because these collections uphold strong integrity standards, your article is presented alongside accurate, relevant, and properly curated content, reinforcing  credibility for readers and strengthening the overall visibility and impact of your research. 

Springer Nature data show that publishing in collections leads to 31% more citations, 30% more downloads, and 63% higher Altmetrics scores than articles published outside of a collection.   

Sustaining these benefits for our authors requires not only great content, but for the content to uphold integrity and be trustworthy to the reader. How do we achieve this and create impactful Springer Nature collections?

Working with guest editors to safeguard collections 

Our efforts to maintain and protecting research integrity in Springer Nature collections are multi-layered. The content itself must uphold integrity standards. As such, all manuscripts submitted to our collections undergo the same rigorous checks as regular submissions. As collections are guest-edited, we use shared editorial oversight between the collection’s guest editor and the editor-in-chief of the journal in which the collection is published.

Selecting and onboarding collection guest editors 

Here’s how our guest editor selection process works.  

1. Before a collection is launched, the CMA team conducts thorough research-integrity checks of proposed guest editors. These research-integrity checks include verifying email authenticity, background screening using both internal and external platforms, validating  credentials and expertise, and assessing editorial qualifications. 
2. The editors-in-chief and publishers of the journals in which the collection will be launched then review the suitability of proposed guest editors and reach a decision.   
3. Once the guest editor for the collection is selected. the commissioning editors clearly communicate the guest editor’s main responsibilities as well as the journal’s ethical standards.  
4. After signing Springer Nature’s general data protection regulation (GDPR)-compliant agreement, guest editors are granted temporary and restricted access to the Springer Nature manuscript-handling system.  
5. The CMA team collaborates with the journal team to provide on-boarding support for the guest editors through tutorials and targeted training on editorial responsibilities, journal policies, research integrity, and the validation checks required during peer review.

Collaborative editorial oversight and responsible editorial practice for integrity  

While guest editors can submit to their own collections, their own research cannot exceed 25% of the total content. All submissions from guest editors are handled by other independent editors to avoid any conflict of interest.   

We also have rules to limit editorial influence over content. For example, guest editors recommend manuscripts to be included in their collection, but the final decision is in the hands of the journal’s editor-in-chief always makes the final decision.   

For each paper submitted to a collection, the journal publishing team is responsible for conducting author conflict-of-interest checks, initial evaluations, scope checking, plagiarism  screening, and peer-review monitoring. If any issues arise, the journal  publishing team speaks with the in-house research integrity group to thoroughly investigate and resolve the case. 

Leading the way on integrity: Adhering to gold-standard guidelines  

The recently published Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines on best practices for guest-edited collections have solved a long-standing challenge. In the early days, each academic publishing house developed different editorial models and associated policies based on their own strategies and requirements. This lack of standardisation created inconsistencies in the handling of content in collections. 

The recent COPE guidelines, which arrived at a critical moment, both acknowledge the value of the guest-edited model and help remedy these issues. And I’m proud to say that all our Springer Nature collections have been applying similar principles since well before the formal release of the guidelines in July 2025.

Using data and AI insights to enhance collection article’s impact  

We’re fortunate enough to be witnessing a digitally transformative age in the history of scholarly publishing, with scientific discovery expanding rapidly.   

One way we are embracing this is our data-driven approach to topic selection. Each collection theme is carefully proposed based on the CMA team’s analysis or suggestions from experts in the field. Topics are then approved by the editors-in-chief and in-house editorial teams. Commissioning editors evaluate various metrics to identify the most promising themes.  or suggestions from experts in the field. Topics are then approved by the editors-in-chief and in-house editorial teams. Commissioning editors evaluate various metrics to identify the most promising themes.

Moreover, artificial intelligence (AI) also plays a key role in enhancing the CMA team’s daily operations, especially in topic selection and author outreach. We use AI to map collections to relevant United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), streamline workflows, and improve strategic alignment. Our AI editor tool, launched earlier this year, is used to explore topics, scope collections, and create marketing text.

This approach, paired with a focus on openness and transparency, gives us confidence that the publishing environment is becoming more diverse, honest, and ethically sound. 

 In summary 

The high quality of Springer Nature collections relies on our thorough checks for guest editors; collaborations with the journal publishing and research integrity teams; and meeting the COPE standards to ensure we continue delivering trustworthy collections.   

If you’re interested in publishing your work in a Springer Nature collection, check out our dedicated Springer Nature collections website, where you can find interviews with guest editors, impact case studies, author success stories, and much more.

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This article was originally published in 2021 and was last updated in April 2026.

Academic publishers provide a range of services to authors who are looking to publish a book, whether for sharing their results with the research community, for career advancement, to cement their legacy, to fulfil funder requirements or another reason. But why involve a publisher if book authors want to publish their work online? Why not just self-publish?

This two-part blog looks at the value that publishers add for open access book authors, focusing on Springer Nature’s imprints, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer and Apress, all of which offer open access options for books. Find part 2 here.

How do authors choose a publisher?

As a book author, you might carefully choose your publisher based on a range of criteria including reputation of the publisher and their prestigious author list, recommendations from peers, whether there is a suitable book series, and the reach of that publisher to connect your work to relevant communities. If you are publishing an open access (OA) book, these criteria might change, as you might need to find funding for an open access fee, also called a book processing charge, leading to questions such as “what will the publisher be doing for me and my research?”

How do open access books work?

An open access book is a peer-reviewed eBook that can be read or downloaded by anyone, anywhere, immediately upon publication without needing to pay or log in. Authors must be acknowledged, and a Creative Commons (CC) licence indicates how the research can be shared, reused and built upon. Our authors retain copyright and we also provide a print copy of the eBook for purchase.

At Springer Nature there is a book processing charge (BPC) for open access books, which covers all the costs of commissioning, arranging peer review, copyediting and proofreading, production, dissemination and promotion of our authors’ work, including online hosting and indexing. The BPC is typically funded by the author’s funder or institution. This model allows for the permanent and unrestricted distribution of research in a sustainable way.

Quality assurance

If you need just one reason to publish your open access (OA) book through a reputable publisher rather than self-publish, then quality assurance is your answer.

Readers need a guarantee that the scientific developments and research theories presented are sound science and high-quality content. Our open access books are therefore rigorously peer-reviewed as an integral part of the submission and evaluation process. The peer review system ensures that published research is authoritative and meets the international standards set by each discipline. We engage in a collaborative refereeing process for all of our books including open access titles

Abstracting and indexing services also boost quality assurance; the Directory of Open Access Books (a discovery service that indexes open access books) requires that all listed academic open access books are subjected to independent and external peer review prior to publication.

Our authors also have the opportunity to publish in book series that are indexed in reputed databases like Scopus.

A world-class editorial experience

Our experienced and dedicated editorial team provides an attentive and personal editorial experience to authors with guidance and support throughout the writing process, from the proposal to the final product.

“I was very impressed by how quickly it was all done, from making decisions in the earlier stages to the actual production of the book. The production was done well, and I am very happy with the finished product.”

- Springer Nature book author survey response (2024)

Editors help shape the book's content for the market from the outset, providing invaluable advice. You will work closely with an editor in your field to refine your proposal, both before and after the peer review feedback. You might be interested in publishing in one of our book series; your editor can advise on the best fit and will pitch your book to the series editor on your behalf. Editors also work closely with our dedicated open access support teams, helping to identify funding opportunities and navigate institutional requirements.

“Whether you’re looking to publish your first book or you’re a seasoned author, your editor is here to support you from proposal to publication. I love working with authors to develop their books from the germ of an idea to an expertly researched work that will advance their field and even change the world."

- Molly Beck, Executive Editor at Palgrave Macmillan

Publisher prestige

We are proud of our publishing heritage and reputation, and both authors and readers can feel confident in the high quality of our books. Indeed, prestige is important in the world of open access publishing, as there has been an unfortunate rise in ‘predatory publishers’ who charge fees without delivering the promised services. Reputable publishers are well-known and recognised by online indexers as well as the online checklist Think. Check. Submit.

In this interview, open access book author Dr Sven Teske shares why he chose to publish with Springer:

“I have been a scientist and engineer for more than 25 years, and for all of that time I have referred to numerous high-quality technical Springer published books. So given Springer’s reputation and reach, it was an easy choice. In this era of fake news and multiple online sources, it is now more important than ever to provide quality information from established reliable sources.

- Dr Sven Teske, lead editor of Achieving the Paris Climate Agreement Goals

Therefore, choosing a prestigious open access book publisher is not just a matter of pride for the author, but it also carries a signal of quality, increases dissemination of the work as readers trust the publisher, and it can help an author’s career.

Springer Nature is a pioneer in open access book publishing, with over 4,500 open access books and more than 670 million chapter downloads. Our list includes award-winning authors and Nobel winners. We are experienced in providing our authors with the best services they need such as open access options for a range of book types, a free Open Access Funding and Policy Support Service, usage statistics via our platform Springer Nature Link, as well as established dissemination routes. We also participate in community projects such as the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit, and we work with funding partners such as Max Planck Society and the University of California, Berkeley Library.

Interested in experiencing the benefits of open access publishing? Visit our open access books hub to learn more about how it all works, or get in touch with a Springer, Palgrave, or Apress publishing editor with your idea.

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As public expectations for accountability and transparency continue to rise, institutions and their researchers are increasingly being asked to demonstrate how their work contributes to meaningful change beyond academia, addressing large societal challenges such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This means that showcasing the real-world impact of research has never been more important.

Amongst others, one of the most powerful measurements of real-world impact is policy influence – when research informs decisions that guide societies. Last year, Springer Nature partnered with Overton, the world’s largest policy document database, to explore how SDG research is cited in policy. These findings were published in the report, From Publications to Policy: The Impact of Research Towards Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

In this blog post, we look at these learnings through an institutional lens, to consider how institutions can support their researchers in achieving greater policy impact.

The impact of SDG research in academia and policy

SDG-related work represents a significant and growing share of global research, accounting for approximately 24% of all research published. The importance of these publications in an academic context is well understood. Topics such as climate, health and social development continue to be of great global relevance and urgency, and on average, Springer Nature’s SDG research receives higher average downloads, citations and Altmetric scores than non-SDG research.

When it comes to the impact of SDG research beyond academia, less is known. However, the report’s findings were encouraging: Academic research is cited in SDG-related policy more often than in wider policy – suggesting a greater connection between policy and research within the SDGs.

So how do researchers and their institutions make the most of this connection, and help their research find its way into policy?

How can institutions support the policy impact of research?

The report identified several factors that contribute to the impact of SDG research in policy, highlighting practical levers that institutions can use to help research reach decision makers:

1. Encourage open access (OA) publishing
   Using a sample of 11 Springer hybrid journals, the report compared OA and non-OA citations in SDG-related policy from 2015 to 2024. The analysis found that OA publications were more likely to have at least one policy citation (32% compared to 18%) and a faster median turnaround time from publication to policy mention (501 days compared to 817 days). By advocating for and facilitating OA publishing, institutions can help their research reach policy faster and more frequently.
2. Connect researchers with intermediaries
   Not all policy documents cite research directly. The report found that think tanks, IGOs and NGOs are up to 20% more likely to use scholarly research in their SDG documents than government bodies – suggesting there might be a role for these types of organisations as knowledge brokers between research and policy. Strengthening dissemination of research to these actors, and building partnerships, can provide a powerful route to amplify research impact.
3. Support researchers with science communication
   When studying the policy impact of different types of content within Nature Portfolio journals, the study found that reviews, news, commentaries and editorials are disproportionately cited in policy – 27% of review articles from the sample were cited at least once in SDG policy, followed by 15% of letters and 9% of original papers. This suggests that short form commentary and accessible summaries are valued by policymakers, and assisting and training researchers in translating their findings into more digestible “policy-ready” formats can help them reach a broader audience.
4. Facilitate collaboration across regions
   The SDGs are inherently global in their nature, with SDG-related research being conducted all over the world. However, the study found that this is not shown in SDG policy, with research from the Global North having a disproportionately high impact – 78% of research cited in SDG policy includes authors based solely in the Global North. This imbalance reflects wider structural barriers within the research ecosystem, but institutions supporting research collaboration can help to amplify research from the Global South and facilitate knowledge exchange between countries facing similar societal challenges.

Reflecting real-world impact within research assessment

All of the recommendations above are inherently tied into the ways researchers are evaluated. Another Springer Nature white paper, The State of Research Assessment, found that a majority of researchers would like their contributions to the “public good” to be weighted more heavily in the assessment of their work. However, current practice falls short, with publication metrics continuing to dominate assessment processes. Only 18% of researchers are assessed on their influence on policy, 23% on whether their outputs are published OA, and 43% on developing international collaborations.

Incentivising these kinds of practices on both an institutional and a wider level is key to maximising their uptake and effectiveness. However, as we have discussed in previous blogs, achieving research assessment reform on a large scale requires buy-in and action from all stakeholders within the research community.

How can publishers support the policy impact of research?

The report also outlined some key recommendations and next steps for publishers. Many of these are similar to those already discussed, including building partnerships with think tanks and IGOs, investing in OA models, increasing efforts to widen geographic representation, and supporting research assessment reform initiatives.

This presents a key opportunity for collaboration between publishers and academic institutions, working together to strengthen the research-to-policy connection, making research more visible and impactful, and drive progress towards the SDGs.

Read the full report, From Publications to Policy: The Impact of Research Towards Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals here.

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As research institutions worldwide face a confluence of major financial, policy, and technology pressures, the current moment presents new challenges, and opportunities, for those dedicated to upholding the standards of integrity and transparency in research. With the World Conference on Research Integrity (WCRI 2026) convening in Vancouver this May, it’s the perfect time to reflect on the pivotal, yet often understated, role that librarians play in supporting researchers and fostering a culture of ethical publishing.

This blog post serves as a companion to the poster presentation I prepared for the WCRI in collaboration with Denis LaCroix of University of Alberta Libraries, delving deeply into how librarians have become the “hidden thread of trust” in the quest for research excellence.

How librarian roles are evolving in research support

Traditionally, librarians have been primarily seen as custodians of knowledge and facilitators of access to information. However, with the rise of open access publishing and open science practices more generally, their responsibilities have expanded far beyond shelving books and managing databases. The seeds of these changes were already visible in the early 2000s, with the Council on Library and Information Resources’ No Brief Candle report in 2008 an early and important call for a fundamental rethinking of academic libraries for the digital age. Research Libraries United Kingdom’s subsequent Re-Skilling for Research report (Auckland 2014, based on survey data from 2012) offered an even more granular template highlighting the skills librarians would need to acquire to adapt to the changing needs of the researchers they serve.

Today, the library foreseen in those visionary documents is a reality at many research institutions, with librarians actively engaged in guiding researchers through the complexities of the scholarly communication process, including Copyright and intellectual property considerations, data management, and compliance with institutional and funder requirements.

Librarians as advocates for research integrity

For all their foresight, the authors of those seminal CLIR and RLUK reports did not focus their attention on issues of research integrity. Yet a number of recent articles, most notably Matthew Goddard and Zachariah Motts’ Publishing Integrity series in Katina (2025), have highlighted how deeply entwined librarian’s research support activities are with broader efforts to ensure research integrity and broader public trust in scientific research.

With the rise of open access publishing, predatory journals, and increasing pressure to publish for professional advancement, researchers face a labyrinth of ethical considerations. Librarians are perhaps uniquely positioned to offer impartial guidance, helping academics navigate these challenges by providing guided access to trustworthy sources of information. Through workshops, one-on-one consultations, and the development of online resources, librarians educate researchers about issues such as plagiarism, proper citation practices, data sharing, and reproducibility. And as Goddard and Motts observe, the rapid uptake of open access agreements has given librarians an important point of entry to engage in promoting ethical research practices, particularly as advocates for the interests of readers of scholarly publications.

This engagement is timely, as publishers are also playing an increasingly visible role in reinforcing research integrity, creating important opportunities for collaboration with librarians. For example, here at Springer Nature, we have made research integrity a core pillar of our publishing mission, investing in dedicated integrity teams, editorial training, and transparent reporting on retractions and corrections. Through our Research Integrity Group, Springer Nature advises editors, reviewers, and authors on ethical best practices, investigates suspected misconduct, and aligns its policies with international standards and guidelines such as those shared by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). These publisher-level efforts complement librarians’ local guidance, enabling more consistent, communitywide support for responsible research conduct.

Supporting best practices for ethical publishing

In recent years, publishers have increased transparency around how integrity checks are embedded throughout the submission and peer review process. Springer Nature publicly shares data on editorial screening, investigations, and retractions, underscoring a commitment to accountability and trust in the scholarly record. Integrity checks are supported by a combination of human expertise and technological tools, including AI-assisted screening designed to detect issues such as convoluted or nonsense text, problematic images, and irrelevant or suspicious references. By documenting these efforts, Springer Nature provides librarians with authoritative examples they can reference when advising researchers on journal selection and responsible publishing practices.

This is critical because of librarians increasing involvement in the publication process itself, working with faculty, and, in some cases, journal editors, to promote transparency and ethical publishing. This includes supporting the use of tools for plagiarism detection, advising on fair and responsible authorship, and helping researchers choose reputable journals for their work. In many institutions, librarians also lead or participate in committees that review cases of suspected misconduct and provide recommendations for corrective action.

Furthermore, librarians are advocates for open science practices, helping researchers comply with mandates for open data and open access publishing. They assist with the creation and maintenance of institutional repositories, and the placement of research outputs such as protocols, computer code, and datasets in specialized repositories, contributing to the verifiability of research studies and ensuring those outputs are discoverable and preserved for future generations.

Collaboration at the heart of research integrity

The most successful efforts in research and publishing integrity are collaborative. Librarians work closely with researchers, administrators, IT professionals, and legal counsel to build robust systems and policies that foster ethical scholarship. By participating in multidisciplinary teams, librarians help bridge gaps in knowledge and understanding, ensuring that integrity is woven into every stage of the research lifecycle.

These initiatives also highlight the shared responsibility across the research ecosystem. Springer Nature emphasizes collaboration among authors, editors, reviewers, publishers, and the broader research community to safeguard integrity at every stage of publication. Librarians, positioned at the intersection of researchers, institutional policy, and external publishers, are key partners in translating these global integrity frameworks into practical, local support. By engaging with publisher guidance, training resources, and openly available integrity data, librarians help ensure that ethical standards are not only upheld but clearly understood by the research communities they serve. 

Preparing for the next chapter in research integrity

As the field of research integrity continues to evolve, the role of librarians will only become more vital. Their expertise, adaptability, and commitment to ethical scholarship make them indispensable allies in the pursuit of trustworthy and impactful research. The World Conference on Research Integrity highlights the need for ongoing dialogue and innovation, and librarians are ready to add their thread to the fabric of research integrity.

We invite conference attendees and the broader research community to engage with librarians as partners in research excellence. Together, we can safeguard the values that underpin scientific progress and ensure that scholarly publishing remains a beacon of truth and credibility in uncertain times.

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For researchers working on the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), progress depends on research reaching beyond academia – policymakers, businesses, educators, and the public – to translate findings into action.

A recent Springer Nature report, From publications to policy, explored how SDG-aligned research is cited in policy documents worldwide, analysing who uses it, where, and how publication choices – such as access model or journal selectivity –influence its uptake. In this blog, we explore one key finding: how open access (OA) can expand the visibility, reach, and policy engagement of your work. 

Open access and the SDGs 

When you publish open access, your research is available to anyone, anywhere. Where your work is aligned with global development priorities, that reach matters even more. 

Open access continues to grow across Springer Nature’s portfolio. In 2024, over 50% of our primary research – 240k articles – was open access, expanding the global pool of knowledge for everyone.  

SDG-related publications are even more likely to be open access: 58% of all Springer Nature’s SDG-related articles were published OA in 2024. This reflects a strong alignment between open dissemination and global development priorities: removing barriers supports the UN’s 2030 agenda by ensuring that knowledge essential to sustainable development is accessible, reusable, and actionable.  

What impact does open access have on SDG research for policymaking? 

The impact of making more SDG-related research OA has been explored in previous research, finding that it can achieve higher usage and attention, compared with non-OA research, and that it attracts more non-academic attention, helping to boost real-world impact. In our new SDG impact report, we explored this from a policy perspective – how does OA publication influence the way SDG research is used in policymaking? 

1. Open access widens availability for policymaking 

The report mapped the access status of scholarly research cited by SDG-related policy documents. Although patterns vary by country, in several – including Argentina, Brazil, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa – OA research accounts for more than 55-60% of SDG research policy citations.  

This trend is consistent with OA usage patterns across our journals, where OA enables greater access to knowledge in countries where availability can be limited. In 2024, downloads of OA content from Low- and Middle-Income Countries increased by 21%. Open dissemination can broaden the potential audience for research relevant to global challenges. 

Open access also broadens dissemination to readers outside well-resourced academic systems. The report identified the key role think tanks, NGOs, and IGOs play as users of academic research in policy documents. Publishing OA facilitates their ability to engage with and translate research into policy recommendations. 

2. Policymakers often use open access research faster 

With the SDGs addressing fast-moving challenges, speed of access matters. We found evidence that open access reaches policy faster, with a shorter median time to first citation (501 days), compared to 817 days for non-OA articles.  

3. Open access is more frequently cited in policy 

The report also showed that open access articles were more likely to receive at least one policy citation and, on average, a higher number of citations per article compared with non-OA articles. It’s worth noting that the distribution is highly skewed, and there is a long-tail pattern of policy influence. 

Publishing your SDG-related work open access 

Together, these findings indicate that when your research supports the SDGs, considering how it is shared may be as important as where it is published.

Open access can deliver a multiplier effect, increasing discoverability, broadening readership, and speeding up transfer into policymaking. It becomes immediately accessible to a broader range of readers geographically and reaches wider non-academic audiences who can translate evidence into policy.

If you are working on SDG-related research, OA can help increase the likelihood it is discovered, read, and cited beyond academia. 

Springer Nature supports many routes for you to publish OA, across over 3k journals and a growing OA books portfolio. We work with institutions

worldwide to establish centralised funding for OA, such as our transformative agreements which now support researchers at over 3,700 institutions worldwide. Choosing an inclusive journal – which often emphasise open practices and multidisciplinary collaboration – can also help facilitate the transfer of your research into policy. Our report found that inclusive journals, such as the Discover series, receive slightly more SDG policy citations than comparative selective journal articles.  

Our journal editors are keen to make sure that SDG relevant research reaches those best placed to implement it. 

“Most of the content we publish in BMC Public Health aligns with SDG 3, but also with SDG 4, SDG 2, SDG 16, SDG 5 and SDG 10, often providing interdisciplinary insights. We really value these studies, as they address urgent global challenges and aim to improve health, reduce inequality and shape public health policy and practice.

We are proud to publish SDG‑related research open access, as this means that anyone, anywhere, can access it, increasing the likelihood of collaboration across countries and communities. As Editors, we are always keen to see the research we publish making a difference in real life, beyond the academic setting.”

Lorena Verduci, PhD, Senior Editor, BMC Public Health

To explore more findings on how research informs policymaking, read the full SDG impact report  

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• How SDG research drives policy: A special report 
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• The SDG Book Series: Interdisciplinary, policy-relevant research 
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• Navigating open access article processing charges: A guide for researchers 
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Research today moves faster, collaborates more widely, and reaches further beyond traditional boundaries than ever before. New technologies, new partnerships, and new expectations are shaping how scientific ideas gain attention and create impact. In this environment, visibility and communication sit alongside excellence as powerful drivers of momentum.

Few people understand this evolving landscape better than Olga Bubnova, Chief Editor of the newly launched Nature Sensors. With broad experience evaluating high‑quality research across sensing, materials, robotics, and biomedical innovation, she has a panoramic view of where science is heading, and the skills that help researchers thrive.

In our conversation, Bubnova shares how researchers can elevate their work through confident communication and intentional visibility, and how organisations can create the structures that support this.

Visibility and communication as research catalysts

As the research landscape continues to broaden and accelerate, visibility has become a powerful source of momentum for researchers and the organisations that support them. Bubnova sees researchers embracing communication as an integral part of their work: a way to share ideas with clarity, participate in their communities, and create opportunities for collaboration.

She describes this as a form of “showmanship in science,” expressed through thoughtful presentations, confident public speaking, meaningful conference engagement, and purposeful use of online platforms. For organisations, this creates exciting opportunities to equip researchers with communication training, presentation support, and structured visibility programmes that elevate both individual talent and organisational reputation.

Indeed, visibility is most impactful when guided with intention. With supportive institutional frameworks, such as advisory guidance for online engagement and best practices for professional storytelling, organisations can help researchers step forward with confidence while reinforcing a strong, consistent presence in the wider research community.

“How people present their ideas and being able to communicate science clearly is extremely important.” - Olga Bubnova, Chief Editor, Nature Sensors

Reputation flourishes in environments that champion growth and celebrate progress. Bubnova highlights how mentorship, recognition, and encouragement shape researcher confidence and help create teams that thrive. These elements underscore the influence organisations have in nurturing positive, vibrant research cultures where talent can flourish.

Strengthening STEM pipeline for women through early engagement

Bubnova offers a clear and pragmatic view on the importance of supporting women in science, particularly in fields where representation remains limited. She observes that the pathways into research begin long before university, shaped by the moments when young learners see what science can be and who it is for. When girls encounter real scientific role models and engaging examples of discovery early on, they form strong, positive connections to STEM that stay with them as they grow.

As Bubnova explains, this journey “starts much, much earlier… from school, almost elementary school,” where curiosity first becomes confidence. Early visibility helps broaden the pipeline by showing young women that their ideas and perspectives have a place in scientific discovery.

Research organisations can play a meaningful role in this. Outreach programmes, collaborations with schools, and initiatives that celebrate diverse researchers help young learners recognise their potential. Partnerships between organisations, funders, industry, and publishers also create valuable opportunities to bring inspiring scientific role models directly into classrooms and community spaces. These shared efforts support a more inclusive future for science by opening doors early and often.

Recognition programmes amplify this further. Through her involvement with the Sony Women in Technology Award, Bubnova has seen how visibility can shape a researcher’s trajectory. Awardees gain recognition, build new networks, and access opportunities that strengthen both their work and their confidence. This demonstrates the impact of platforms that highlight exceptional women in STEM and empower them to grow, contribute, and lead.

The expanding world of sensing and the power of interdisciplinarity

Just as visibility is essential to broadening participation in science, so too is it key to bringing emerging fields into focus within a research community. From people to ideas, Bubnova sees visibility as a catalyst.

The launch of Nature Sensors comes at a moment of remarkable creativity across sensing technologies, with innovations emerging across healthcare, robotics, environmental monitoring, materials engineering, and beyond. Bubnova highlights several areas shaping this momentum, each opening new opportunities for collaboration and real‑world impact.

One area of rapid development is intelligent sensing, systems that do far more than detect signals. These platforms interpret data, feed it back into the system, and continually refine how information is sensed, processed, and applied. This creates responsive technologies that adapt to their environments and support smarter decisions.

Alongside this, multimodal sensing is gaining traction. Inspired by the way our own bodies gather information through sight, sound, smell, and touch, these platforms combine multiple sensing modes into one system. This blended approach produces richer, more nuanced data and expands what sensing technologies can achieve across practical applications.

Bubnova also points to the momentum behind miniaturisation and edge sensing. As devices become smaller and more portable, advanced capabilities once limited to controlled environments such as ultrasound or MRI‑style insights can now support medical, industrial, and consumer use cases in entirely new ways. These innovations bring sensing technology directly into real‑world contexts where it can make an immediate difference.

Across all these areas, societal impact plays a central role. Bubnova emphasises the value of research tested in everyday environments, where sensing systems demonstrate how they support people, communities, and industries. This focus aligns closely with the journal’s vision: Championing work that is scalable, deployable, and purposeful.

What unites these developments is their inherently interdisciplinary nature. Modern sensing research sits at the intersection of engineering, biology, materials science, clinical insight, data science, AI, and embedded systems. Each discipline contributes depth and perspective, creating solutions that are both innovative and deeply aligned with user needs.

“When teams begin with a real‑world problem, everything becomes naturally interdisciplinary.” - Olga Bubnova, Chief Editor, Nature Sensors

Supporting interdisciplinary teams helps strengthen internal research ecosystems, spark new ideas, and encourage collaborative thinking across traditional boundaries. It also opens pathways for partnerships in sectors where sensing technologies are evolving quickly, giving organisations a clearer view of emerging trends, and helping them stay ahead of new possibilities. This is a field full of energy and one where collaborative, cross‑functional thinking continues to shape what comes next.

Supporting researchers in a changing landscape

Supporting researchers today means recognising that their needs are evolving and that the environment around them is evolving even faster. When organisations invest in communication skills, mentorship, and meaningful opportunities for collaboration, they create the conditions where ideas can grow with confidence. These foundations help teams step into new opportunities with confidence and lead the way in their fields.

This is also the intention behind Nature Sensors. The journal aims to bring forward‑looking research into view while celebrating the people who drive that progress, expanding visibility, strengthening connections across disciplines, and spotlighting innovations with real‑world impact. It reflects a research culture that is increasingly dynamic, interconnected and shaped by how well we support the individuals at its heart.

To explore journals and tools that align with your own organisational focus areas, and to find additional resources that help enhance researcher visibility, communication and collaboration, visit the Nature Portfolio resources hub for librarians.

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AI is quickly reshaping how research is done, and what researchers expect from their libraries. In September/2025 a webinar hosted by Chile’s Consorcio para el Acceso a la Información Electrónica (CINCEL) and Springer Nature, librarians explored the concepts, trends, and practical use cases that matter most to academic library services today.

CINCEL is Chile’s national consortium for scientific information. Since 2003, it has helped universities and public institutions expand access to international journals, books, and digital resources, supporting more equitable access to research across the country. To continue empowering its librarian community, CINCEL partnered with Springer Nature to host a webinar focused on AI in practice. The session encouraged consortium librarians to explore how AI can support their daily activities, while supporting the research community.

The webinar began with a quick pulse check to see if the librarians were using AI in their tasks. The pull result showed that 41% had experimented but didn’t use them regularly, 39% used AI for specific tasks, and a smaller group had not used AI yet, or weren’t sure what “counts” as AI.

Building on this context, the webinar introduced core AI terminology and the technologies most relevant to academic libraries today. This foundation allowed for a broader conversation about what AI can offer, from enhancing services to supporting researchers more efficiently, while also addressing the questions and ethical considerations that come with adopting new tools.

Here’s a look at the central points raised during the webinar, providing a straightforward overview of emerging AI trends that can inform your library’s next steps.

From AI foundations to the idea of superintelligence

To raise the audience's knowledge level, the webinar began providing simple definitions of AI concepts. At its simplest, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the ability of a system to perform tasks we associate with human intelligence, such as understanding language, recognising patterns, making predictions, or generating content. In the library context, it could be translated as faster drafting, summarisation, cataloguing, translation, and support for discovery workflows.

• Large Language Models (LLMs): LLMs are AI models trained on massive collections of text to understand natural language prompts and generate humanlike responses. Well-known LLMs include ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Claude. They perform tasks such as drafting, summarizing, translating, and answering questions.
• Machine Learning (ML) Techniques: LLMs are built using ML techniques that enable them to learn from large datasets and predict relevant outputs. The session covered four key ML approaches:
  • Supervised learning: Learns from labelled examples (e.g., correct/incorrect) and uses this knowledge to make predictions, for example, usage predictions.
  • Unsupervised learning: Finds patterns or clusters in data without labels; useful for uncovering trends such as usage behaviour.
  • Reinforcement learning: Improves through trial-and-error feedback, optimising decisions over time.
  • Deep learning: A subset of ML that uses multi‑layer neural networks to process unstructured data such as long text, images, and audio.

The webinar also highlighted a practical distinction: Generative AI creates content, while retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) combines generation with search, returning answers grounded in specific documents (often with citations). For research support, grounding and traceability are essential.

Finally, the session briefly defined two long-term concepts that often appear in AI conversations: artificial general intelligence (AGI), a hypothetical AI that could perform any intellectual task a human can, and superintelligence, which would exceed human capability across domains. These ideas remain speculative, but they continue to shape debates about AI governance and safety.

How libraries are putting AI to work

As libraries continue to navigate rapid developments in AI, the webinar highlighted several trends that are likely to be felt most directly in 2025. These include the emergence of AI agents and increased automation, the growing availability of smaller language models (SLMs), expanded data‑centre infrastructure, and rising attention to environmental impact and workforce change.

Rather than discussing these shifts in isolation, the session connected them to the practical opportunities already available to libraries. Many of these trends are influencing day‑to‑day work in small but meaningful ways, creating new options for streamlining tasks, enhancing services, and supporting decision‑making. This set the stage for a series of concrete examples showing how libraries are beginning to apply AI today.

• Content creation/revision, Translation, Data analysis (user behavior, collection usage, predictions): Draft emails, instructional materials, workshop outlines, or guides, tasks that often take librarians considerable time to refine. Tools: AI Platforms (Chat-GPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Deep Seek).
• Synthetic Videos: Product and service demos, tutorials, educational videos on specific topics, and short videos for social media. Tools example: Prezi, Colossyan, Synthesia, HeyGen, StoryKit.
• AI Agents and Chatbots: Process automation (cataloguing, classification, metadata), virtual assistants and chatbots: 24/7 user support. Example of tools: Copilot Studio, Chatbase, Botsonic, QuickChat.  Real-world example: bot use at Hong Kong Polytechnic University Library.
• More advanced tools for Data Analytics and Design/Prototyping: Lovable (Create interactive forms, Design thematic microsites, Develop internal tools, Prototype innovation ideas) and Google Colab (Bibliographic data analysis, Information visualization, Task automation).

The takeaway: AI is already useful in small, concrete ways, especially when it reduces routine work and frees time for higher-value research support.

Ethical, responsible and transparent AI use

The webinar stressed that AI outputs can reflect bias in training data (including gaps in language and cultural coverage). The recommendation is to treat AI results as drafts and always check for: validation, contextualisation, and uneven performance across user groups.

Another essential theme: Data privacy is a key concern. Many free AI tools use submitted information to train or improve their models, which means anything entered may not stay confidential. Librarians should be cautious and ensure they do not share sensitive or restricted content when using such tools.

Throughout the discussion, one message remained consistent: Keeping a human in the loop is critical. AI systems can produce plausible but incorrect information, and expert review is essential to maintain accuracy, trust, and integrity.

SN AI capabilities supporting the research community

The webinar also shared examples of Springer Nature editorial AI tools to support researchers, improve workflows, and strengthen research integrity.

Nature Research Assistant (currently in beta) is designed to help researchers work through growing volumes of literature by supporting discovery, summarising evidence, and helping with early drafting.

For research integrity, Springer Nature has developed AI tools such as our irrelevant reference checker tool and our AI-generated nonsense-text-checking tool, previously known as Geppetto. After internal use, Springer Nature donated Geppettoto the STM Integrity Hub to support wider adoption across the community.

Springer Nature also supports global collaboration through free AI-powered translation services for book authors, and through protocols.io, which can convert existing documents into interactive, publishable protocols (with careful review of imported content).

Preparing libraries for an AI‑driven research future

The session wrapped up by looking ahead at what growing AI adoption could mean for academic libraries. Rather than diving into big projects straight away, librarians were encouraged to start small, try out simple tools, set clear goals, and gradually build confidence. Even testing an AI assistant for common questions or using a tool to summarise a long document can help teams get a feel for where AI genuinely adds value.

Collaboration came through as another key theme. Creating communities of practice, teaming up with colleagues from other departments, or joining hackathons can make it easier to learn, swap ideas, and experiment together. These kinds of shared efforts have already sparked creative solutions in other settings, including prototypes developed within Springer Nature.

Besides introducing practical ways to begin using AI in libraries, responsible adoption is key. The webinar emphasized the importance of using AI ethically and responsibly, guided by Springer Nature’s AI Principles: Dignity, Respect, and Minimizing Harm; Fairness and Inclusivity; Transparency; Accountability; Privacy and Data Governance.

Looking ahead, building AI literacy will help everyone navigate changes in research workflows. Springer Nature’s publication Perspectives on AI in Scholarly Communications brings together voices from across the ecosystem and offers helpful context on how AI is influencing the way research is produced, shared , and evaluated. These insights can support libraries as they consider how AI might fit into their own services and future planning.

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As an early career researcher (ECR), you’re likely to be seeking funding, building a reputation, establishing your profile, and trying to make your work stand out — all at once. Publishing open access (OA) can help you do exactly that. It puts your research in front of the people who need it — fellow researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and students around the world — immediately and forever, without a paywall standing in the way.

At Springer, we believe knowledge should travel as far as possible, and we’ve been helping researchers achieve that for more than 180 years. Today, OA is central to that mission. 

This blog post is part of a series on OA funding options. Here, we focus on what’s available to you as an ECR publishing with Springer, whether you’re working on a journal article, an individual book chapter, or a whole book.

Why make your research publications open access? 

OA research is freely available online from the moment it’s published. This means more readers, more citations, and more opportunities to make a real difference with your work — which really matters when you’re at the start of your career. 
 
Publishing OA can help you: 

• Increase the visibility and discoverability of your research. 

• Reach a broader audience and attract more citations. 

• Share findings faster across disciplines and regions. 

• Comply with funder or institutional OA mandates. 

• Build your profile at a critical stage of your academic career. 

We know that the cost of OA publishing can feel like a barrier, especially early on, when budgets are tight and institutional support may seem lacking. That’s why we offer a range of funding routes to help make it happen.

Publishing open access articles 

Springer publishes both fully OA journals (where every article in the journal is freely available) and hybrid journals that allow you to make your article OA within a subscription journal — giving you flexibility to publish your research in the right journal. The evidence is striking: OA articles in Springer hybrid journals are accessed 4 times more often and cited 1.6 times more often on average.

Article processing charges: how to cover them 

Unlike traditional subscription journals, where publishing is free to authors, OA publishing typically involves an article processing charge (APC) to cover the costs at every stage of the publication process, from administering peer reviews to copy-editing and hosting the final article on dedicated servers. But there are several ways these can be covered or reduced — and you may already have access to funding you don’t know about. 

Open access agreements 

Publishing your article through an OA agreement is the easiest route to OA for eligible authors. Many institutions provide financial support for researchers to cover APCs, often through OA agreements with publishers — either independently or through a consortium across multiple institutions. To find out what’s available at your institution, browse Springer Nature’s OA agreement pages, which shows details of the agreements in each region or country. Your university library is also a great resource — and you may find your APC is already fully covered. 

Research grant funding 

Your grant funding may cover OA publication costs. Many funders now actively encourage or even require OA publishing, so it’s worth checking your grant terms first. 

Waivers and discounts 

Springer offers APC waivers and discounts for authors based in eligible low- and middle-income countries and considers requests from authors facing financial hardship on a case-by-case basis. You can find the list of eligible countries in our APC waivers and discounts. 

Publishing open access books 

For many researchers, particularly in the humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary, a book is more than a publication. It’s a statement of expertise and an important milestone. Springer offers OA publishing for single-author books, contributed volumes, and edited books, all instantly freely available online upon publication. 

OA books are widely downloaded — Springer’s OA portfolio has achieved over 200 million chapter downloads since 2013.

“We are moving faster as a society — we need things at the end of a click for immediate access. If it isn’t, then it won’t be used or cited as much.” 

- Dr. Roseli Pellens, co-editor of Biodiversity Conservation and Phylogenetic Systematics (SpringerOpen, 2016)

Individual chapters can also be published OA via a chapter processing charge (CPC), making it a realistic option if you’re contributing to an edited volume rather than authoring a whole book. For an ECR, that kind of visibility can open doors to collaborations, speaking invitations, and career opportunities you might not have expected. 

Book processing charges: your options 

Publishing an OA book involves a book processing charge (BPC) — but, like articles, there are several options to cover it. 

Institutional support

A growing number of universities maintain dedicated OA book funds, and many of these are increasingly accessible to ECRs. Check with your institution’s library or research office. 

Research funders  

Some funding bodies allow grants to cover OA book costs, particularly where the publication is a direct output of funded research. If you are applying for a grant, it is worth checking with your funder early, ideally before you finalise your application. 

Collaborative funding 

For edited books or collaborative projects, BPCs can often be shared across contributing institutions, departments, or co-editors, making what might seem like a high cost more manageable. 

Tools and support to help you find funding 

Not sure where to start? You’re not alone. OA funding can feel daunting to navigate for the first time, but we’ve built tools and services to make the process easier. 

Our journal and funding finder is a quick way of matching your research to the correct Springer journal, as well as exploring the OA funding options available to you. It’s a practical first step if you’re not sure which journal to target or what funding might apply to you. 

We also offer a free OA support service. Our team can help you identify funding available through your institution or funder, connect you with your institution’s OA coordinator, guide you through the application process, and even help you demonstrate the benefits of OA to support your application. With more than 350 APC funds available worldwide — across over 170 funders, 130 institutions, and a further 170 institutions distributing OA block grants — you are sure to find the right support. 

Getting to grips with your funding options early is a good approach and will help you avoid any unwelcome surprises later. 

Where knowledge transforms into action 

At Springer, we are more than a publisher — we are a partner to the global research community, genuinely invested in your success. OA is how we make sure your work reaches the audience it deserves: the researchers who will build on it, the practitioners who will use it, and the decision-makers who need it.

Want to find out more? Explore your OA funding options here and find out what support is already available to you.

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As the world pushes harder to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, research has become more important than ever. Whether it’s tackling climate change or improving global health, real progress depends on strong evidence and a research community that’s collaborative and globally connected. 

According to recent findings in Springer Nature’s SDG Impact Report, From publications to policy - The impact of research towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, one trend stands out: China has emerged as one of the most influential players in global SDG research and policy. Not only is China now producing the largest volume of SDG-related research, but that research is also generating significant academic impact and shaping sustainability policy far beyond its borders. 

This blog explores three key dimensions of this upward trajectory: 

1. China’s rapid growth as a contributor of SDG-related research 
2. The increasing academic citation impact of China’s SDG research output 
3. How Chinese research is influencing global policy aligned with the SDGs 

China: Now the largest contributor of SDG‑related research 

Over the past two decades, worldwide academic engagement with the SDGs has grown substantially. Yet few countries have expanded their research output as rapidly, or as consistently, as China. According to the report, China is now the single largest contributor of SDG‑related research articles globally. 

Long-term growth outpacing global averages 

A comparison of compound annual growth rates (CAGR) across regions highlights just how significant China’s contribution has become. The SDGs were adopted in 2015. Since then, China's SDG‑related research output has grown by an average of 21% annually. For context, this compares to 5% in the United States, around 9% in Europe, 13% in Africa, 17% in India and 13% elsewhere in Asia. 

This growth trend extends back before the Goals themselves, with SDG‑related research from China expanding at 20% in the period 2000 - 2015, once again the highest among major global regions – and showing China’s longstanding commitment to research on sustainability. 

SDG research growing faster than non-SDG output 

Importantly, the growth of SDG-linked research in China significantly outpaces the growth of its overall research output. While the CAGR for all Chinese research between 2016 and 2024 stands at 12%, SDG-related publications grew at nearly double that rate. 

This indicates not only a broad expansion of national research capabilities, but also a deliberate and increasing prioritisation of sustainability-focused inquiry. 

Rising academic influence: China’s SDG research impact 

Volume alone does not capture the full story. The impact of research, reflected through citations and academic uptake, is an equally important indicator of its influence. 

China’s citation impact: from lowest to highest 

In 2000, China had one of the lowest average citation impacts among major research nations. But by 2022, that landscape had changed dramatically. According to the report, China now holds the highest average citation impact for SDG‑related articles, highlighting a major shift in the global distribution of sustainability research leadership.

Several factors have seemingly contributed to this rise: 

• Greater international collaboration 
• Strengthening of national research infrastructure 
• Increased openness and visibility of Chinese research outputs 
• Growing expertise in fields central to the SDGs, including climate science, health, and engineering 

SDG articles outperform non-SDG in citation impact 

Across different regions, research related to the SDGs tends to receive more citations than non‑SDG work, a sign that sustainability-focused studies are increasingly seen as impactful and relevant for addressing societal challenges. China is a clear example of this pattern: Chinese SDG publications consistently attract more citations, on average, than its non‑SDG research output, respectively 28%, 58% and 46% higher in mean citations in 2000, 2025 and 2022. 

This indicates that China is not only producing more sustainability research, but it is producing research that is resonating strongly within the global academic community. 

Impact outside academia: Chinese research in global SDG policy 

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of China’s growing role in SDG research is its influence beyond academia. Research that shapes policy has the potential to drive tangible societal outcomes, from improving public health systems to guiding environmental regulation. 

The report shows that research from China is now widely cited in SDG-related policy documents across the world*, placing China firmly within the top 15 most cited countries for SDG policy influence. 

_{* The data on Chinese policy are comparatively limited, due to access constraint. As a result, the project focused on tracking the international use of Chinese-authored research rather than how Chinese policy cites research.} 

Where Chinese research is being cited 

A breakdown of citations reveals a diverse and international policymaking audience engaging with Chinese research: 

• Intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), including the UN, UNESCO, WHO, IMF, and OECD, cite Chinese research more frequently than any other individual nation in their SDG-related policy. 
• Outside IGOs, the largest share of Chinese research citations in SDG policy comes from the United States (22%), followed by the United Kingdom (8%), the European Union (7%), and Germany (6%). 

This reflects both the global reach of China-authored research and its relevance to international policymakers addressing sustainability challenges. 

 It's worth noting that the analysis distinguishes between citations from global organisations (counted as “IGO” or “EU”) versus national governments to avoid distorting country-level influence. This ensures a clearer picture of how widely China’s research is used across different governance levels. 

A strong role in global health and climate policy 

Chinese research has a particularly significant impact in two SDGs: 

• SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being – representing 38% of policy citations 
• SDG 13: Climate Action – accounting for 13% 

These findings highlight China’s deep engagement in areas fundamental to global well-being and sustainability. Whether in pandemic preparedness, public health interventions, climate mitigation, or environmental monitoring, Chinese research is increasingly shaping international responses. 

Conclusion: The growing real-world impact of Chinese research 

The findings from the Springer Nature SDG Impact Report, From publications to policy, offer an insightful narrative of China’s role in the global sustainability research landscape and the international recognition of its contributions to solving global challenges. Over the past two decades, China has: 

• Become the largest source of SDG-related research articles worldwide 
• Achieved the highest average academic citation impact in SDG research 
• Emerged as a major contributor to SDG-related policy across IGOs and countries 

As the world approaches the 2030 SDG deadline, the influence of Chinese research, across academia, international policy, and multilateral decision-making, will continue to shape pathways toward a more sustainable future. 

With strong engagement from Chinese scholars and institutions, and with increasing uptake by policymakers worldwide, China’s role in advancing the SDGs has become both vital and increasingly impactful. 

Read the full report: From publications to policy: The impact of research towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals 

Related content: 

• Blog: How SDG research drives policy 
• Report: From publications to policy: The impact of research towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals 
• Report: Global Research Pulse: China 
• Blog: The SDG Book Series: Interdisciplinary, policy-relevant research 

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Early career researchers bring valuable new perspectives to the research community, along with a curiosity that helps push knowledge forward. As they start publishing, apply for funding, share their first results and find their voice within their communities, having the right support can make a huge difference at this early stage. Therefore, understanding open access, visibility and the tools that support effective research communication can help researchers lay the foundations for their careers.

Recognising this, Springer Nature’s Account Development (AD) team created a dedicated webinar series for institutions across Europe. These sessions introduce researchers to open access agreements and practical strategies for promoting their work. The response from participants has been overwhelmingly positive, and one researcher’s story stands out as testament to the impact of these sessions.

Building researcher confidence through skills‑focused webinars

As researchers begin shaping their publishing journey, many tell us they are eager to understand how to make their work more visible and how to communicate their findings with confidence. It’s not always obvious where to start, especially when juggling publishing pressures, funding expectations and the realities of early‑career life. That’s why we designed these webinars with the researcher’s needs in mind, to give them practical skills that can be applied immediately to strengthen both their research communication and professional profile.

During our session “How to Promote Your Research,” we explored what research visibility really means for researchers today. We looked at how strong communication can support funding applications, inspire collaboration, increase readership and contribute positively to the institution’s reputation. The response was extraordinary, with 560 researchers joining live, an incredible indication of how important this topic is across the research community.

What I appreciated most were the thoughtful questions that were asked about adapting their communication for different audiences and using digital platforms more effectively. These are challenges many early‑career researchers face, and they’re exactly the areas were small, practical adjustments can make a significant difference.

In the session, we introduced several techniques to start using right away, including:

• Using storytelling to bring clarity and meaning to findings
• Creating visual abstracts and multimedia summaries
• Engaging with audiences through social media, blogs, podcasts and webinars
• Using altmetrics to understand how their work is being shared and discussed

Each of these approaches helps build a wider understanding of how research is received beyond traditional academic metrics. More importantly, they empower researchers to take an active role in shaping how your work travels within your field and beyond it.

Our goal in these webinars is simple: To provide the tools, confidence and insight to communicate research in ways that feel authentic, accessible and impactful. And from the energy and engagement researchers bring to every session, it’s clear how committed they are to amplifying their work and sharing it with the world.

How one researcher discovered the hidden impact of her work

Among the attendees was Maria Babakhanyan Stone, a postdoctoral researcher who joined the session out of personal curiosity and a desire to discover new ways to share her work. During her PhD, she had put enormous effort into her dissertation and often looked for creative ways to make astronomy more accessible, recording YouTube explainer videos, developing visuals from her thesis figures and running workshops for learners of all ages. Communicating science clearly had always been important to her, and the webinar offered a chance to build on that passion. This opportunity was made possible through the support and resources of INAF (the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics), where she now works as a postdoc.

When we introduced Altmetrics, the concept was completely new to her. Hearing how online engagement can reveal interest in research beyond citations caught her attention, and she decided to take a look at the publicly available download data for her thesis at the University of Turku.

What she found truly made her day. A quick look at the university’s archived metrics showed that her astronomy thesis had been downloaded more often than others in the same topic area and topped several usage rankings. Her thesis stood out over a seven‑year period and even ranked among the most‑downloaded astronomy theses of the past decade. For Maria, this uncovered a new and unexpected dimension of impact.

She captured the moment beautifully in her blog: “I am thrilled to celebrate a small achievement which I discovered unexpectedly. I found out through happenstance that my PhD Thesis in Astronomy has been downloaded impactfully more times than others in the topic of astronomy from the University of Turku… what it means is that my PhD Thesis is making a difference with its social impact.”

For her, the discovery was meaningful not just because of the numbers, but because it showed that her effort to make astronomy welcoming and engaging was reaching real readers. Her thesis had found an audience genuinely interested in her work and her creative outreach was helping her research travel further than she realised.

Maria’s story is a powerful reminder of how empowering it can be for early‑career researchers to see the broader life of their work. A single idea introduced during the webinar sparked a deeper understanding of how her research resonates and strengthened her confidence in the contribution she is making to her field.

Understanding the full reach of research

Maria’s experience reflects something we see more and more among early‑career researchers: a growing desire to understand the full influence of their work beyond traditional measures. Citations will always matter, but they don’t tell the whole story. Downloads, online mentions, media attention and social sharing can offer a much more immediate sense of how the research is being discovered, discussed and used across global networks.

These kinds of engagement can spark new collaborations, strengthen funding or job applications and help researchers recognise the real‑world impact their work is already having. For institutions, supporting this broader understanding means giving researchers the confidence to communicate their work effectively and take proactive steps to increase visibility. These approaches enable researchers to pursue new opportunities, engage broader communities and advance steadily through each stage of their publishing process.

Working together to support the research community

Looking ahead, institutions continue to play a vital role in helping early‑career researchers thrive. Through the Author Journey series, we remain committed to offering workshops and webinars that provide practical, skills‑focused guidance on understanding open access policies, promoting research effectively, navigating both traditional and alternative metrics, building a strong digital presence and approaching the publishing process with clarity and confidence. These sessions are designed to help researchers find their voice, understand the reach of their work and grow their confidence as they contribute to the global research community. Every researcher’s story is unique, and for many, a single webinar can spark new insight that reshapes how they think about visibility, communication and impact.

To continue strengthening support for early‑career researchers, we invite institutions to explore our open access resources, including guidance on managing article processing charges, insights into how open access is transforming research and global stories of open access in action. Institutions can also register for upcoming webinars in the Author Journey series to offer their research communities practical, inspiring and actionable support. If your institution is looking for ways to deepen its engagement or enhance the support available to researchers, these resources and sessions are an easy way to get started and we would be delighted to welcome you along.

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Migration is transforming communities across the globe and the research surrounding it must evolve just as rapidly. Since 2015, the IMISCOE–Springer Nature partnership has played a crucial role in meeting that need, providing a trusted platform for interdisciplinary analysis of one of today’s most complex challenges. As part of our long-standing commitment to supporting research and education, the IMISCOE Research Series has become a foundational resource for scholars, librarians, and policymakers alike.

Professor Anna Triandafyllidou, an internationally recognised sociologist and leading global expert on migration governance, shares her perspective on how migration research has shifted over the past decade and how digital publishing is shaping its future. As Chair of the IMISCOE Editorial Committee and Editor‑in‑Chief of the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, she plays a central role in guiding scholarly conversations across the field. With more than 160 peer‑reviewed publications and decades of leadership in international research collaborations, Professor Triandafyllidou brings a uniquely global and interdisciplinary perspective to the evolving landscape of migration studies.

How the 2015 migration crisis changed research and publishing 

The year 2015 marked a turning point in European migration history, but also in the evolution of academic publishing. As millions fled conflict in Syria and across West Asia, migration became a defining feature across multiple regions of the world. "Certainly, 2015 is an important year, the repercussions of which we still see today. 2015 was the year of the 'Wir schaffen das' ('We can do this'), and of significant solidarity towards people fleeing Syria," recalls Professor Anna Triandafyllidou. 

That same year, IMISCOE partnered with Springer Nature, aiming to make scientific knowledge on migration as globally accessible as possible. In times of crisis, access to knowledge matters most. The IMISCOE Research Series has helped overcome barriers and respond to urgent migration challenges by fostering collaboration and timely interdisciplinary research. 

Migration research underwent profound transformations after the 2015 crisis. As Professor Triandafyllidou explains, "Initially, it was a foundational moment for Europe becoming a land of refuge. It very quickly backfired. In 2016, we had the EU-Turkey statement and the closure of the borders through the Balkans, and after that, we see an increase in securitization, not just of migration but also of asylum".  

The shifting socio-political landscape and the new challenges demanded research that could capture the complexities of migration. What was needed was a publishing model that could keep pace with the rapidly evolving realities of people on the move while capturing the human dimensions of migration. 

Making migration research more accessible and impactful  

The partnership between IMISCOE and Springer represented a shift in how migration research would be produced, disseminated, and accessed. Four key innovations stand out: 

1.  Open access is expanding the reach of migration research 

"The series is Open Access. Now it's going to be 100% Open Access, but it was always the aim, I think on both the IMISCOE and Springer side at the time when it wasn't that common that books would be Open Access," Professor Triandafyllidou emphasizes. 

Before Open Access became widely embraced, this decision marked a notably progressive step. Springer Nature began piloting open-access book publishing in 2011, reflecting our strong commitment to making trustworthy, high-quality knowledge accessible to everyone. This commitment to open knowledge ensures that vital research can reach policymakers, NGOs, and researchers in the regions most affected by migration without barriers. By removing access limitations, Open Access helps close knowledge gaps and supports informed, evidence-based research and decision-making on a global scale. "The strategy of the series is to expand the knowledge base and to really offer a service to the student and research community in immigration studies," notes Professor Triandafyllidou. 

2. Digital publishing is enabling timely responses to global challenges 

The digital format of the series enables researchers to respond quickly to emerging issues. As Professor Triandafyllidou mentioned, "We had a volume in 2021 already on migration and pandemics that was trying to seize the moment." This flexibility ensures that scholarship remains timely and responsive, narrowing the distance between research and implementation. 

According to Professor Triandafyllidou, the series publishes around 10 books per year - almost one per month. This rapid pace, made possible by the digital publishing model, facilitates efficiency and a broader distribution, allowing important research to reach a global audience without delay. 

3. Global perspectives are strengthening migration scholarship  

Perhaps most importantly, the digital format has been instrumental in expanding the global scope of migration research. "Our series has become more global by design," explains Professor Triandafyllidou. "We have made a concerted effort to have editors and authors from the regions. So, when we write about West Africa, South and Southeast Asia, the Asia Pacific, Latin America, and so on, we have people from those regions." 

This commitment to diverse voices challenges the traditional dominance of destination-country perspectives in migration studies. "I also find that in the research that we do, there's very much a bias from the country of destination, and we need to change that," she adds. 

4. Peer review is ensuring quality and academic integrity  

Professor Triandafyllidou proves that accessibility and quality can go hand in hand, emphasizing that the IMISCOE Research Series stands out for its full-manuscript peer review process, ensuring scholarly excellence. "The series is fully peer-reviewed. We ask for and review the full manuscript, not only the book proposal. It has also happened that we've rejected manuscripts or that they must go through revisions with detailed feedback."  

Advancing migration research for a changing world 

Migration continues to intersect with global challenges, and the IMISCOE Research Series is evolving to reflect these emerging realities. Digital technologies, from AI to broader tools, are reshaping politics and mobility. As Professor Triandafyllidou notes, migrants today navigate vast amounts of information, which highlights the importance of trusted sources and digital infrastructures that support informed decisions.  

Geopolitical shifts are also influencing migration in powerful ways. The growing role of mobility in political discourse calls for thoughtful, inclusive research. As Professor Triandafyllidou suggests, migration studies benefit from broadening their scope, moving beyond Eurocentric frameworks and recognising migration as a central force in societal transformation.

The IMISCOE Research Series highlights the power of eBooks in advancing migration research by combining accessibility with academic rigour. It delivers timely, diverse and socially relevant scholarship to communities worldwide. Explore the series and connect with a global network of researchers shaping the future of migration studies, because what we publish and how we shape it helps build a more informed and connected world.  

When the shelf went digital 

2026 marks twenty years since we launched our eBook collections. Much has changed in that time across science, technology, and society. Can you remember a time before social media, when Obama took office, or when the Higgs Boson was discovered? Explore our timeline of 20 major scientific milestones that have shaped our lives and the books we publish. Visit When the shelf went digital. 

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What if you could find rich portfolios of advanced therapeutics for treating cancer, autoimmune disorders, metabolic disorders, and more, that had already proven efficacy and safety in advanced clinical trials. But also, that the companies developing them, while biological powerhouses, lack the global marketing footprint to bring them to the wider world. That’s the situation today with 10 of China’s most advanced biotech and pharmaceutical companies. To look at this closely, AdisInsight recently published a report, Strategic Pharma Insights: Asia Focus Part I: China’s Movers and Shakers, which explores this in detail.

Driven in part by the regulatory reforms China made in 2015 and 2020, as well as investments in basic and advanced biomedical research, these China-based companies (including names like Innovent Biologics, Akeso, Sinopharm, Insilico Medicine, and others) have deep portfolios of therapeutics that are either already approved in China, or in late-stage clinical trials that have already demonstrated their efficacy, ready for global partnerships. You will find a wealth of detail about these 10 companies in Strategic Pharma Insights: Asia Focus Part I: China’s Movers & Shakers; but I wanted to pick out a few highlights, including some examples of existing, highly successful China-global partnerships.

China’s therapeutic and innovative strengths

Common threads connecting these 10 companies include focusing on both life-threatening and chronic disease states like cancer and autoimmune disorders, and also an emphasis on biologics, including monoclonal and bispecific antibodies, chimeric antigen T-cell (CAR-T) technology, antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), vaccines, immunotherapy, and other advanced and biologic modalities.

For example, Legend Biotech’s CAR-T cell therapy, which is an advanced immunotherapy approach that involves genetically reprogramming the patient’s own T-cells so that they’re able to identify and destroy cancer cells. These T-cells are laboratory-modified to express chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), specialised proteins that can identify cancer-specific markers, and then re-transfused into the patient’s cancerous tissue. Indicated mainly for blood cancers like specific types of leukaemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma, this CAR-T treatment’s revenue is forecast to reach $47.28 billion by 2030.

3SBIo’s deal with Pfizer for its SSGJ-707 is another example. This is a bispecific antibody that works on programmed cell death-1 ligand-1 inhibitors, indicated for non-small cell cancer and other solid tumours. Based on its strong Phase II objective response rates (72-100% among patients completing at least two treatment evaluations), 3SBio was able to make a global licensing deal with Pfizer, and Pfizer is advancing this treatment to global Phase III trials for non-small cell lung cancer and other solid tumours.

Akeso, Inc. has a monoclonal antibody for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) that, in clinical trials, outperformed Merck’s Keytruda (the market leader). This monoclonal antibody, called Ivonescimab, gave patients progression-free survival of more than 11 months before tumours began growing again, which is almost double Keytruda’s 5.8 months. But despite this superiour clinical performance, Ivonescimab’s market share lags Keytruda, because while Akeso has the stronger therapeutic, Merck has the stronger global footprint (in addition Keytruda’s first-mover advantage).

Innovent Biologics has monoclonal antibody candidates IB 3009 and IBI 343, the latter of which is fast-tracked for treating advanced pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). It’s also in Phase II trials for gastric cancer and completed Phase I/II for pancreatic cancer. Based on this potential, Takeda has agreed to fully develop and commercialise IBI 343 outside of Greater China. IBI 3009 is a monoclonal antibody indicated for neuroendocrine carcinoma and small cell lung cancer. It is a cutting-edge approach in anticancer therapy combining the specificity of antibody-directed conjugation with the potent inhibitory effects on a critical enzyme involved in DNA replication and tumour progression.

Strengthening international biopharma alliances

A quick summary of some of the other active partnerships already concluded or in process include: 

• Innovent Biologics has expanded globally through strategic alliances:   
  • Partnered with Roche to launch the ADC candidate IBI3009 internationally.   
  • Collaborates with Mankind Pharma to bring its PD-1 inhibitor, sintilimab, to the Indian market.   
  • Entered a $1.2 billion deal with Takeda, granting global rights to late-stage assets IBI363 and IBI343, plus an option on a bispecific ADC, signaling major East–West co-development momentum.   
• Sciwind Biosciences signed a $70 million upfront licensing deal with Verdiva Bio (exChina & Korea) for its metabolic-disease candidate ecnoglutide, with up to $2.4 billion in milestones, marking a major move into global markets. 
• Duality Biologics secured global licensing of DB1418 from Avenzo Therapeutics following its Phase III success of BNT323, demonstrating healthy cross-border biotech licensing activity. 
• WuXi Biologics has advanced its Global Dual Sourcing Strategy, delivering on its global CDMO model—including EMA approval of its Dundalk site and further expansion in Europe and Singapore, enhancing its positioning as a global-scale biologics manufacturing partner.

Companies such as Innovent, Sciwind, and Duality illustrate China’s growing capacity in complex biologics and AI-driven platforms, bringing the right people together with novel technology to develop powerful new therapeutics.

Growing opportunities for China-global partnerships

China’s regulatory reforms has streamlined the approval process, especially for breakthrough technologies and for critical diseases. This has both attracted local and global investment, and spurred innovation. As a consequence, China’s pharmaceutical companies have been able to develop these therapeutics and quickly shepherd them through trials, despite these companies often lack global infrastructures or marketing footprints.

So, for global pharmaceutical companies that do have that global infrastructure and the ability to globalise new therapies, but whose pipelines might be moving more slowly, partnering with Chinese firms is an obvious choice. Global firms get access to strong candidates that are either already locally licensed, or in successful late-stage trials (which reduces risk), and the Chinese firms get access to the global market. And patients get access to new, life-saving medicine. It’s a win-win-win scenario.

Find out more: You’ll find a wealth of detailed insights in AdisInsight’s report, Strategic Pharma Insights: Asia Focus Part I: China’s Movers & Shakers, that will help global R&D managers identify partners and evaluate their real potential.   

Related content

• How China’s regulatory reforms are reshaping global clinical trials and partnerships  
• What R&D leaders can learn from AI-driven drug discovery 
• Navigating the changing landscape of drug discovery: the role of collaboration, biologics and data 
• Trends and practicalities of digital transformation in life sciences R&D 
• Breakthrough therapies and blockbuster drug launches that are shaping healthcare  

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Whatever your research topic, the step-by-step methods behind your study are key to understanding your results. 

These protocols may be detailed instructions for a specific experiment or synthesis, day-to day lab / field instructions, computational workflows, or the broader methodological framework used to answer a research question. Sharing them openly helps others understand what you did and what they would need to do to reproduce, verify, or build on your work. It also helps you meet the open science expectations of funders and publishers. 

Building on our previous introduction to sharing protocols, this guide covers how to prepare, publish, license and cite your protocols so they’re easy to find, use, and receive credit for.

Why best practices matter

Sharing detailed protocols openly enables clarity, usability, and reproducibility, so that others can follow your methods without guesswork. Recording your complete methods in an accessible format addresses many common pain points:

• Reduce guesswork by replacing vague or missing steps with precise instructions.  
• Enhance reproducibility by surfacing dependencies (such as reagents, equipment, or software and their versions, where relevant). 
• Provide clarity by stating exact conditions (e.g. timings, temperatures, or acceptance ranges when those matter). 
• Ensure readability by avoiding jargon and using plain, defined terms. 
• Prevent dead ends by including expected outcomes and simple troubleshooting. 

By clearly recording your methods, you make it easier for anyone trying to replicate or build on your work, including your future self. Sharing protocols also helps to contextualise results so that others may accurately interpret and reuse your data. 

Benefits of sharing your detailed protocols openly:

• Reproducible results: complete steps, conditions, and materials let others (and your future self) repeat your work. 
• Faster peer review: clear methods reduce back-and-forth with editors and reviewers. 
• Compliance: many funders, institutions, and journals encourage or require accessible, reusable methods. 
• Reuse & recognition: modular, self-contained, and citable protocols can be discovered, reused, and properly credited. 
• Future proofing for your own work: versioned, well-documented methods save you time later and remove uncertainty as your protocol is adapted. 
• Community benefits: sharing methods for others to build on advances science for all. 

Step one: prepare your protocol for open sharing

- Write in clear language: keep instructions in active voice (e.g. instead of “a 25 µl reaction was set up containing” write: “set up a 25 µl reaction containing”), define all acronyms, and write each step as plainly as you can. 

- Make it complete: it should be possible to follow each step you took, using the same resources that you used. 

• Cover the essentials: list all materials, equipment, and resources you used (e.g. reagents/instruments, datasets/archives, analytical tools) with supplier, model, lot/batch numbers, and RRIDs, where relevant. Include recipes and detailed parameters (e.g., buffer recipes; corpus selection rules) and software versions.  
• Write the steps in chronological order: for each step, include the conditions that matter for your field (e.g. time, temperature, voltage, sampling rate, thresholds) and the expected output or critical points, if relevant.  
• Provide guidance: note any expertise required, safety information, ethics notes, limitations, and references (see also PRO-MaP’s protocol reporting checklist). 

- Add context:  

• Write for discoverability: give your protocol a precise and searchable name and include a 3-4 sentence abstract that explains what it does, when to use it, and the expected outcome. Be sure to add relevant keywords. 
• Provide tips: consider additional points that would help someone repeat the method; for example, troubleshooting tips and visuals, such as short instructional videos or images for critical steps. 

- Give credit: ensure all authors involved in developing the protocol are properly credited, apply similar criteria as you would to determining authors on a research manuscript. Authorship order on a protocol often differs from an associated manuscript, ensuring appropriate credit for specific outputs. 

- Seek feedback: ask others from your group, department, or  chosen collaborators to review the complete protocol. 

Step two: choose the right platform  

We encourage authors to share protocols on a dynamic protocol platform of their choice, such as protocols.io. Unlike a static word or PDF file, these platforms may: 

• Allow you to structure your method in a step-by-step format that’s easy to follow. 
• Provide a DOI so your protocol is citable and findable. 
• Enable version control. 
• Integrate with tools you already use, such as Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs), cloud storage servers, and some journal submission systems. 

Read Nature’s policy on protocols sharing. 

Step three: ensure long-term accessibility  

Think of a protocol as a brief, modular, and self-contained scientific publication. With a DOI-minting repository like protocols.io, readers can retrieve the exact version of your method years later, while still enabling you to update the protocol with separate versions as your method evolves over time.  

• Label your version, to keep a clear log of what has changed over time and why. Ensure that each version has its own DOI. 
• Cite your protocol: add the protocol DOI to the Methods section and include a citation in the References list to ensure accessibility. 

Step four: copyright licence and permissions  

A licence tells others exactly what they may do with your protocol, and under what conditions.   

• Select a Creative Commons licence for maximum reuse potential (this is the default when publishing on protocols.io). 
• Determine if your protocol repository of choice has licensing terms  
• Check if your funder mandates the use of a specific licence.  
• If your protocol uses any third-party content, check whether you have permission to include them under your chosen licence and ensure the content is properly credited. 
• Ensure that the licence information is included in the protocol record. 

Step five: ethical and legal considerations  

Like with other research outputs, it’s important to share protocols responsibly. 

• Protect participants and IP: remove confidential or identifying information (e.g. patient IDs, GPS coordinates to sensitive sites, proprietary formulas, trade secrets, security keys, or identifiable photos of people). 
• If removing details affects a step, say so briefly and explain how readers can proceed (e.g. use of synthetic data, or controlled access). 
• Check compliance with funder, institutional, and journal policies: some studies must follow specific reporting standards (e.g. MDAR, ARRIVE, CONSORT, PRISMA, field-specific checklists). Link to these in your protocol record where relevant. 

Quick checklist for authors

If you keep these checks in mind as you work through your research project, you’ll be ready to share your protocols openly and be fully aligned with best practices and Springer Nature’s policy expectations. 

1. Protocol is complete and clear  
2. Context (title, abstract, keywords) and troubleshooting included 
3. All authors are properly credited 
4. Dynamic protocols repository chosen and DOI assigned 
5. Creative Commons licence added 
6. Versioning and change log started  
7. Protocol DOI cited in any associated manuscript (in both Methods and References) 
8. Funders acknowledged and references used to develop the protocol cited, if applicable. 

If you’re interested in learning more about sharing your protocols, protocols.io hosts regular webinars on why and how to share detailed protocols. And read more about why sharing protocols and methods matters. 

Additional resources

• Blog post: Supporting open science practices: Why sharing protocols matters 
• Springer Nature’s protocol sharing policy 
• Protocols.io guide to publishing 
• Five keys to writing a reproducible lab protocol (Nature) 
• Blog post: Protocols in practice: Benefits of the protocols.io platform for a public health laboratory network 
• Blog post: Improving research reproducibility with open method sharing 
• Best practices and tools for reporting reproducible fluorescence microscopy methods (Nature) 
• Best practices in method reporting (Nature collection) 
• Blog post: How to share your research code openly: Best practices for transparency and reuse

When the Athenian courier Philippides ran to Athens from Marathon with news of victory in battle, his story inspired the modern marathon. In their book, The Marathon of the Messenger — A History of Messenger RNA Vaccines, cousins Jérôme and Nicolas Lemonnier used this image of a long-distance messenger to frame their exploration of mRNA vaccine development. It’s a tale of how institutions, researchers, and knowledge networks, together, support essential research. They bring together scientific history, personal exploration, and ideas’ evolutions, including their family’s meaningful connection to an early mRNA patent. This blog post takes a look at the 20-year scientific path and impact of mRNA vaccine technologies, the myths and misconceptions surrounding the topic, and the potential for a new era of personalised medicine.

For institutions across the research ecosystem, this story shows how important foundational research, interdisciplinary collaboration, and effective knowledge stewardship are. The book brings to life the value of clear scientific communication, long-term investment in scientific inquiry, and the integrated role institutions play in supporting discoveries that shape public health. As mRNA technologies make new, personalised approaches to medicine possible, this story celebrates the institutional environments that help scientific ideas become concrete solutions.

While neither Lemonnier cousin is strictly a biologist or immunologist (Jérôme Lemonnier is a biological engineer and Nicolas Lemonnier has a background in computer science and finance), discovering Nicolas’ father (and Jérôme’s uncle) listed on an underlying patent inspired the cousins to want to find out more. This book grew out of what they uncovered about how their family was part of the broader story of mRNA vaccine development, and the scientific communities that brought it to life.

A marathon, not a sprint: 20 years in development

The book’s title draws on the ancient Greek legend of Philippides, a soldier messenger who ran extraordinary distances to seek military support before the Battle of Marathon. After fighting in the battle, he ran back to Athens to announce the victory, only to collapse and die immediately upon delivering the message.

The authors said, “This is a metaphor for what medical research is, but also about the ways mRNA delivers genetic instructions before being quickly degraded. It also reflects the long and often challenging journey of scientific research, much like in the development of mRNA vaccines.”

When we deployed mRNA vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic, it looked to most of the world like a sprint; that this technology appeared suddenly. But, in reality, developing Covid-19 vaccines was the final kilometre of a 20-year development marathon. Research on mRNA vaccine technology, initially designed for cancer treatments, was already two decades old when the pandemic hit.

“I believed there was something important to write about. People now think the Covid-19 vaccines were developed in just one year, but we found a 20-year-old patent that already described immunogenic preparations related to mRNA vaccines. Discoveries made by French and other European researchers deserve to be known by the world,” said Jérôme Lemonnier.

This patent mentions Nicolas Lemonier’s father (who is also Jérôme’s uncle), a former research professor in immunology at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Dr Steve Pascolo, the elder Lemonnier’s former student and now a researcher in his own right and the patent’s holder, cited his former professor in his patent. Finding this inspired Nicolas to reach out to Pascolo to ask about his father’s contribution, and this grew into a broader mission.

“We believed that people had the right to accessible scientific information about the history of mRNA vaccines, the right to ask questions and explore if Europe could benefit from its early innovations. This was the beginning of our story,” - Nicolas Lemonnier, co-author

Dispelling mRNA vaccine myths and misconceptions

Until the pandemic, mRNA vaccine development hadn’t been the type of research to make headlines. The fact that most people were unaware of this work has led to misconceptions about it, including that it appeared suddenly, but also about how mRNA vaccines work. “Our book has now become a tool in the fight against disinformation, but this was not necessarily its original aim,” Jérôme Lemonnier explains. “I think now, years after the pandemic, there is even more noise around the vaccine misconceptions than it used to be back when we wrote it.”

Nicolas Lemonnier explains how mRNA simply delivers a message to produce a protein, much like how traditional vaccines, including those for measles, mumps, and rubella, work. The difference lies in the purification and safety of the delivered protein. “Some people still describe the vaccine as a form of gene therapy, and I believe this is tackled in our book by discussing with experts and explaining how the vaccine works.”

The authors acknowledge that there are valid concerns about new technologies; and the book aims to provide clear, accessible explanations. “We wanted to provide rational answers and not answers inspired by fear,” Jérôme Lemonnier said. Rather than pushing people to accept vaccination through pressure, they believe in giving information that encourages informed decisions. Their book shares the same message, helping readers understand the long, often start-and-stop journey behind the science.

Explaining science with cartoons 

Cartoons which combine illustrations with humour can help explain sometimes complex scientific concepts. So, the Lemonniers collaborated with cartoonist Gilles Charrot, whose cartoons help break down scientific concepts into digestible bits, sparking readers’ curiosity. And while translating the humour from French to English was a challenge, the authors saw it as essential for keeping the book engaging to a wider audience. Whether you’re flipping through for fun or diving deep into the science, the cartoons add a unique and accessible layer to the story of mRNA vaccines.

Trust and promise of mRNA in cancer and genetic medicine 

Public discourse, and even politics, around mRNA vaccines has gotten worse since the pandemic. As an example: In February 2026, the US FDA initially refused to consider Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine (it eventually reversed this decision). When asked about this, the Lemonniers were pessimistic. Societal debates have created uncertainty, even among scientists, turning the topic into a battle between beliefs and evidence.

“With time, I think people eventually validate what is good, but we’re going through a period where a lot of people are doubting science and politics” Nicolas Lemonnier said. He compared Covid-19 vaccines with other medical breakthroughs that were once controversial but later became widely accepted.

Originally developed for cancer therapies, mRNA technology now shows even greater potential. Jérôme Lemonnier, who is working on a follow-up book with Chantal Pichon, sees the field as just the beginning. “It is something truly fascinating and we see progress before our eyes in genetic diseases, regenerative and personalized medicine. Covid-19 accelerated these advances, but costs remain a challenge. One dose to treat cancer can cost $100,000,” he explained.

Even so, he remains optimistic “I do think that we are entering the era of personalised medicine. As Nicolas mentioned, informatics and computer engineering will play an even greater role in the development of mRNA therapies, especially in treating cancer.” He describes this moment as the start of a medical revolution, comparable in importance to Pasteur’s discoveries, with interest growing worldwide.

Remaining challenges for global mRNA adoption

MRNA vaccines face additional logistical challenges, like the need for built-out cold storage infrastructure. Also, some diseases that researchers hope mRNA vaccines can treat are especially difficult. Cancer, for example, comes from the body’s own tissues and therefore evades most immune responses. HIV specifically attacks the immune system, making any vaccine approach, including mRNA vaccines, extraordinarily difficult.

Ultimately, trust is the decisive challenge while public confidence in medical technologies and in the institutions delivering them remains fragile. As Nicolas Lemonnier reminds readers, “Don’t be afraid of biology research.”

As years go by, new breakthroughs and crises strike the world, as the need for trusted resources becomes more important than ever. Stories like this recall the importance of research and its history to address misinformation and bring to light the stories behind medical breakthroughs. 

Learn more about the development of mRNA vaccines at When the Shelf went Digital - 20 Years of Springer Nature eBooks highlighting key moments of two decades of breakthroughs in science, medicine, technology, and beyond.

Related content

• From evangelist to essential: A librarian’s eBook journey
• How China’s regulatory reforms are reshaping global clinical trials and partnerships
• Twenty years of eBooks: How libraries turned a quiet shift into a global revolution in digital access
• Breakthrough therapies and blockbuster drug launches that are shaping healthcare
• The Medicine Collection

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To mark the 20th anniversary of Springer Nature’s eBook collections, we’re taking a closer look at the transition from print to digital and the people who helped shape it. They are behind every workflow change, metadata breakthrough, and new access model, and they’ve experimented, adapted, and built the foundations of the digital library experience we know today.

Today we speak with Springer Nature’s Wouter van der Velde, Global Director Books Solutions Portfolio, and Itsco van der Linden, Head of Test Engineering. They were there from the beginning and saw firsthand how technology, teamwork, and library partnerships transformed the way books are created and discovered.

When eBooks first emerged in scholarly communication, van der Velde was worked in epublishing and van der Linden managed ereference content. At that stage, their work focused on converting print books into digital versions. The major shift came later, when eBooks were born digital rather than simply converted from print.

Their stories offer an insightful look into digital transformation, highlighting a journey of experimentation, problem-solving, and a commitment to improving discovery and access worldwide.

From print shelves to online platforms: The beginning of Springer Nature eBooks

When eBooks first appeared around the 1990s, they looked very different from today’s digital resources. Only select titles were digitalised, and reference works, often spanning ten or more volumes, were converted into HTML or XML-based online encyclopaedias rather than full eBooks in a PDF format. As van der Linden recalls, “They weren’t really eBooks yet. You browsed them online, almost like a website. That was the starting point.”  

Meanwhile, usage data was still a mystery, COUNTER standards for books didn’t yet exist, and the technology to track digital engagement was still emerging. For van der Velde, who worked on early usage statistics, those first years were about learning how readers interacted with digital content and identifying the patterns we are now accustomed to.

The shift to digital-first publishing

Around the early 2000s, the newly merged Kluwer-Springer publisher decided to prioritise digital access for book publishing, as was already the case for journals.   

The decision to digitise all books, publishing them electronically by default, expanded the reach of books, paving the way for today’s globally accessible eBook collections. It flipped traditional workflows, shifting from print-first to digital-first production. Rethinking old formats also meant that PDF-only workflows gave way to XML-based production, enabling EPUB formats and multi-device reading that libraries and users rely on today. 

Technology challenges and breakthroughs in digitising books 

The early days of publishing digital books posed significant challenges, as technology struggled to keep pace with the demands of publishing full-book PDFs. Two decades ago, bandwidth limitations meant that a 20‑MB file could slow or even crash servers. To keep platforms stable, full book downloads had to be removed, offering chapter-based access instead.   

Many reference works were built in XML with style sheets to enable browsing and keyword search, rather than static PDFs. “Little did we know that, 20 years later, users would still ask, ‘Where is the PDF?’ because they want to see page numbers,” van der Linden remarks.  

Metadata also required development in the beginning, as MARC records were extracted manually and stored in local databases. Packages and subject classifications were sometimes transferred unexpectedly, causing confusion for libraries. Over time, processes were streamlined and standardised, laying the foundation for a reliable metadata ecosystem.

Early experiments and innovation  

One of the earliest digital experiments meant to challenge traditional editorial standards was a “custom book” tool that allowed users to select chapters from various books and compile them into a single printed volume. Innovative at the time, it didn’t gain adoption due to the limited content pool, making the initiative impractical.   

Although ahead of its time, this early concept anticipated what, more than two decades later, would become highly adopted, thanks to algorithms. “With AI, we’re doing something very similar now, creating topic‑based literature reviews using content across books and journals. The difference today is scale and technology,” van der Velde explains.  

“Back then, we built things that people weren’t ready for or didn’t need yet,” van der Linden adds. “Today we have a better sense of what users find useful, and the technology to support it properly.”  

New skills for a digital future

The rise of eBooks brought to life the e-publishing department. This new department focused on innovation across disciplines and teams, similar to van der Linden’s current role in production technology. It encompassed technical skills, metadata expertise, product development, and working in close collaboration with editorial and production teams.   

This multidisciplinary approach was still emerging two decades ago, opening doors for new possibilities. Authors and editors progressively embraced the new standards and workflows, and the growing reality that digital access would soon become essential for both researchers and libraries. 

Scaling up: Orchestrating the publication of over 12,000 eBooks a year  

Today, Springer Nature publishes over 12,000 eBooks per year, nearly two books every hour. They are available on Springer Nature Link, where libraries have uninterrupted access to reliable content, even at such a large scale.  

But high‑quality digital publishing is more than hosting files. It requires consistent metadata, format quality control, integrity screening, and more. Van der Velde notes: “People think hosting eBooks is easy. But when you publish this much content, every process, from metadata to rights delivery, must work perfectly.”

The future of eBooks: Trends and predictions  

Looking ahead, both van der Velde and van der Linden agree that AI will change how content is discovered, but not the value of books themselves. While the fundamentals of scholarly publishing are here to stay, the way content is accessed and consumed will continue to evolve. Van der Velde and van der Linden highlight three trends they foresee:  

• Books will remain essential for deep, structured, authoritative knowledge  
• PDFs may eventually decline, as flexible, multi-platform formats become standard  
• DOI‑based citations will increasingly replace page numbers  

Two decades of eBooks evolution, shaped together with libraries  

For many academic libraries, the past two decades have been defined by the shift from print collections to digital ecosystems that support discovery, access, and long‑term preservation. Close collaboration between librarians and publishing teams shapes the continuous process of development.  

Springer Nature’s journey of eBooks development mirrors the evolution of library services themselves, from managing print collections to navigating complex digital ecosystems. The shift to digital‑first publishing, the maturation of metadata standards, and the rise of multi‑format reading have all been shaped not only by technological progress but by the needs and feedback of libraries working to support diverse research communities.  

The journey has been one of experimentation, infrastructure building, and continuous refinement. Every improvement in platform stability, every enhancement in discoverability, every refinement in research integrity workflows ultimately supports the mission librarians champion every day: enabling equitable, reliable access to knowledge.  

Continuing the partnership with libraries in the next era of eBooks

Looking ahead, the next phase of digital books will bring new opportunities and questions for libraries. AI‑driven discovery tools, evolving citation practices, and the gradual shift away from static PDFs will influence how collections are built, taught, and preserved. Yet the core value of books as structured, authoritative sources remains unchanged. And the partnership and collaboration between publishers and libraries will continue to shape how these resources are delivered, accessed, and sustained.  

As Springer Nature marks two decades of eBook collections, this milestone is as much a library story as a publishing one. The foundation built so far, through shared challenges, learning, and commitment, sets the stage for deeper collaboration in the years to come. And as the landscape evolves, librarians will remain essential voices in defining what meaningful, future‑ready digital access looks like.

What has it been like, working closely with librarians through the eBooks transition? In the companion blog we speak with Senior Licensing Manager Amber Farmer, who shares from her experience and how this evolving relationship shaped both her role and the fabric of the modern academic library. 

When the shelf went digital: Explore memorable moments and key milestones from two decades of eBooks. And stay tuned for more stories from early-adopter librarians who have been part of this journey, views of authors, and Springer Nature colleagues who are bringing these milestones to your screens.

Related content

• From evangelist to essential: A librarian’s eBook journey 
• Twenty years of eBooks: How libraries turned a quiet shift into a global revolution in digital access 
• Eight proven steps to improve eBook collection development in libraries

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For librarians, research offices and institutional leaders, open access (OA) offers an opportunity to expand reach, strengthen impact, and deliver greater value to their communities. During the 2025 Charleston Conference, Springer Nature hosted a lunch and learn at the historic American Theater, where librarians shared practical strategies to achieve these goals. Get four insights from the discussion, with suggestions for actions you can implement today.

Open access (OA) continues to shape scholarly publishing, and success depends on aligning strategies with institutional priorities such as impact, compliance, affordability, and visibility. At the lunch and learn event, titled ‘Making OA work for you: TA experiences from the field,’ we heard inspiring presentations from librarians representing various institutions of different sizes, focus areas, and funding models:

• Danielle Aloia, Assistant Director of Information Management at New York Medical College, Capozzi Library, part of the NERL-Springer TA
• Mark Paris, Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Resources and Discovery at Brandeis University, part of the NERL-Springer TA
• Peggy Kain, Associate Professor and Licensing and Scholarly Communication Librarian at The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Libraries, part of the Lyrasis-Springer TA

The conversation highlighted actionable steps that enable progress today and in the years ahead. From building data-driven dashboards to implementing transformative agreements (TAs), the ideas presented empower libraries and research offices to move confidently toward sustainable OA.

“This has been the most useful session I’ve been to out of the entire conference.” 

Lunch and learn participant Willa Liburd Tavernier, Research Impact and Open Scholarship Librarian, Indiana University

What’s working: Four insights to take forward

The discussion at the lunch and learn was rich with practical ideas that libraries and research offices can apply today. The following key takeaways combine strategic thinking with real-world examples from institutions already making progress. Each one offers a way to strengthen OA implementation, improve visibility, and demonstrate value to stakeholders. 

(1) Transformative agreements: When collaboration lowers barriers

TAs can be powerful levers for growing the adoption of OA while stabilizing costs. In her presentation, Danielle Aloia, from the Capozzi Library at New York Medical College, explored the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches, from consortia and fellowships to TAs, for gaining an OA advantage. She shared how her institution decided on a TA through a consortia, which enabled them to cover their researchers’ article processing charges (APCs) for publishing OA.

Indeed, speakers emphasized that joining a consortium often makes these agreements more feasible than negotiating solo, spreading administrative load, and unlocking better terms. If your institution is mid-sized or has limited negotiation capacity, a consortium route may be the most pragmatic way to build momentum (and internal support).

Action to consider: Map your local priorities (publishing output, author disciplines, compliance needs) to consortium options already operating in your region. Engage peers to benchmark terms and workflows, especially reporting and author support.

(2) Data-driven advocacy: Make value visible 

The University of Alabama at Birmingham Libraries’ approach shows how granular tracking transforms perceptions of library value. This institution focused on transformative agreements (also referred to as Read and Publish agreements), and uses rigorous tracking and targeted communication, calculating savings per researcher and per college to demonstrate tangible benefits. According to Peggy Kain, “Giving back to the university and showing the value of the library has been key.”

Kain explained how the library tracks and records data for every APC funded through their TAs: approval dates, publishers, APC costs, journal types, faculty ranks, and departmental affiliations. By rolling that up into dashboards, the team has demonstrated over $2 million in institutional savings. This level of detail enables targeted conversations with departments and senior leadership, connecting OA spend to academic outcomes.

Action to consider: Start a minimally viable dataset: fields you can reliably capture each month without new systems. Build from there and publish periodic internal “OA impact briefs” for deans and research leadership.

(3) Repositories: Cornerstone, not afterthought

Brandeis University underscored the role of the institutional repository as the cornerstone of OA strategy supporting compliance, preserving outputs and amplifying visibility. Mark Paris explained how repositories are also an engagement platform: They give departments and research offices a lens on where outputs sit and what could be improved.

Action to consider: Audit repository metadata quality, deposit workflows, and outreach. Prioritize researcher experience (fast deposit, clear rights guidance) and surface analytics that matter locally (downloads by department, open vs. closed proportions).

(4) Funders’ shifting priorities: Impact over inventory 

Participants in the lunch and learn noted that traditional collection narratives resonate less with funders; impact evidence resonates more. OA initiatives aligned to institutional goals, research visibility, collaboration, and societal benefit are easier to champion when supported by data and clear stories about researcher outcomes.

Action to consider: Build a simple “funders’ view” dashboard: outputs by funder with OA status, compliance, and usage. Pair it with practitioner stories that connect OA to research impact in the field.

“OA is a journey that thrives on collaboration, data-driven decisions, and a willingness to innovate.”

Librarians leading with communication in the OA transition

Throughout the discussion, speakers emphasized the importance of partnerships and reframing OA within the broader context of scholarly communication. In her presentation, Danielle Aloia stated, “Pursuing OA work and forming partnerships is essential work.” She further explained that while this work is sometimes perceived as extra and time-consuming, it is in fact essential.

As the role of librarians shifts and transforms in the age of OA, collaborations across various departments in your institutions become vital. Librarians are pivotal to getting both the buy-in and the funding to support and promote OA from various stakeholders in their institution. They advocate for OA with these stakeholders to ensure support and educate and inform colleagues on the value of OA publishing for the researchers, the institutions, and science more broadly.

Communication is therefore fundamental to the broader goals of librarians, especially in the OA transition. Through clear, consistent dialogue and proactive engagement, librarians build trust, foster collaboration, and create momentum for change.

OA is a journey that thrives on collaboration, data-driven decisions, and a willingness to innovate. The thoughtful insights and open discussions at this lunch and learn underscore the power of partnerships and practical strategies that help institutions achieve impact and sustainability.

Whichever route you and your institution are on, we are here to support you. Learn more about TAs and how you can benefit from them. 

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AI introduces new integrity challenges in research publishing, while open access (OA) can amplify the exposure to AI-generated or manipulated content. How can the research ecosystem safeguard trust in science in this era of OA and AI? To explore this question, a roundtable discussion brought together voices from an academic institution, a library, and a publisher. In this blog we share insights from the discussion, which underscored the need for robust guidelines and strong collaboration among all stakeholders to maintain trust in research.

Research integrity is the adherence to ethical principles and academic rigour in conducting and reporting scientific research, in order to maintain trust in science. With the increasing adoption of OA publishing and the growing use of AI, maintaining research integrity is becoming more critical and increasingly complex. OA increases the reach of research, making trust more important than ever. And while AI holds substantial benefits for research, it also raises questions about authorship, reproducibility, and ethics.

A roundtable discussion concluding the webinar ‘Open access and research integrity’ examined how integrity can be maintained in this evolving landscape, from a distinctly French perspective.

The discussion offered a holistic view on navigating the challenges of this era, with insights from an academic institution, a library, and a publisher:

• Alexandrine Cheronet, Publishing Director for Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, and Chemistry, Springer Nature
• Michel Dubois, Research Director at CNRS and Head of the French Office for Scientific Integrity (OFIS), as well as Director of the Group for Sociological Method Analysis at Sorbonne
• Sébastien Perrin, Director of the Library at École des Mines de Paris (PSL)
• Moderator: Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri, Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at Claude Bernard University Lyon

The panellists explored what integrity means today and how policies, training, and technologies must adapt. By representing key stakeholders across the research ecosystem, they underscored why collaboration among publishers, institutions, and libraries is essential to maintaining research integrity in an era shaped by OA and AI.

Defining research integrity amid evolving practices

The roundtable discussion opened with Michel Dubois presenting the French legal definition of research integrity: Integrity is the set of rules and values that must govern research activities to guarantee honesty and rigour.

While this definition provides a foundation, its application varies across disciplines. This flexibility, Dubois noted, demands collaboration between all stakeholders (researchers, institutions, publishers and libraries), to ensure consistency and trust.

Strengthening Dubois’ perspective, Alexandrine Cheronet emphasised that publishers work closely with the scientific community to define and update codes of conduct. These codes guide authors, editors, and reviewers through ethical practices, from submission to publication. Integrity is dynamic, she explained, and Springer Nature’s standards therefore evolve alongside technology and global research practices.

Building trust in AI for research workflows

Generative AI is reshaping research workflows, from literature reviews to manuscript preparation. While these tools offer speed and efficiency, they raise critical questions about authorship, reproducibility, and ethical use. Cheronet explained how Springer Nature integrates AI into editorial workflows under strict governance, using it for tasks like quality checks and metadata management. However, she stressed that human oversight remains essential: AI can assist, but it cannot replace the judgment and expertise of editors and reviewers.

Advocating for transparency in algorithms and data sources, Perrin called for “trusted AI tools” that go beyond the black box. He warned that without clear standards, the research ecosystem risks introducing bias and undermining confidence in scholarly outputs.

Strengthening peer review through transparency

Peer review remains the cornerstone of quality assurance. The panel discussed various approaches such as open peer review and post-publication commentary, which aim to increase transparency. Despite these innovations, Dubois observed that peer review, while imperfect, continues to be perceived as providing a critical layer of scrutiny. 

Cheronet added that vigilance is essential to detect anomalies, such as AI-generated reviews or unusually rapid turnaround times. Libraries also play a role here in supporting researchers, for instance by clarifying evolving evaluation practices.

Driving cultural change through integrity training

Training emerged as a recurring theme throughout the discussion. While doctoral programs increasingly include mandatory integrity training, Dubois warned that senior researchers and supervisors often lack awareness of these principles. The trainers must also be trained, he explained, noting that cultural change requires engagement at all career stages.

Perrin described how libraries deliver training on citation ethics, plagiarism prevention, and data management. However, he acknowledged challenges in formal recognition of these trainings within academic structures.

Cheronet emphasised the need for global harmonisation, as publishers operate across diverse regulatory environments. The goal, she said, is to provide clear, accessible resources that support ethical research practices everywhere.

Building trust through ethical correction practices

Retractions often come to mind when research integrity is discussed. Dubois argued that retractions should be viewed not as punitive measures but as part of a virtuous cycle of scientific self-correction. Similarly, Springer Nature's Head of Research Integrity, Resolutions, Tim Kersjes, has argued that retractions are an effective corrective to the scholarly record, and should not carry a negative stigma.

The Springer Nature Research Integrity Group investigates every integrity concern thoroughly, and takes action once the investigation has concluded. Cheronet noted that Springer Nature has improved transparency in retraction notices.  It is investing efforts to make unethical practices unattractive and impractical, while supporting researchers in doing the right thing.

Practical steps to supporting research integrity

Research integrity continues to advance alongside the evolution of research. The rise of open science and AI brings exciting opportunities to refine policies, technologies, and practices. Collaboration among publishers, institutions, and libraries will strengthen trust and transparency across the global research ecosystem.

The roundtable discussion highlighted practical steps that empower every stakeholder to play a role in strengthening trust and transparency:

• Researchers: Embrace best practices for citation, data sharing, and responsible AI use.
• Libraries: Position themselves as leaders in integrity education and data governance.
• Institutions: Extend integrity training beyond doctoral students to include supervisors and senior staff.
• Publishers: Enhance transparency in workflows, corrections, and AI-assisted processes.

As each stakeholder contributes in their own way, these combined efforts move us toward a research ecosystem built on trust, transparency, and genuine partnership. When everyone takes part, it becomes easier to navigate new technologies, adapt to evolving expectations, and support ethical research practices across the board. Little by little, these shared commitments help strengthen a culture that is both resilient and forward‑looking.

If you’re interested in exploring these topics further, you can find more insights on how Springer Nature approaches research integrity and the responsible use of artificial intelligence. It’s a great way to see how these principles are being put into practice and how they continue to evolve in step with the global research community.

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• Navigating research integrity in the age of AI

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A collection is a curated, evolving body of knowledge focused on a timely research theme or interdisciplinary topic. Collections boost research visibility and impact, while fostering collaboration and supporting emerging or interdisciplinary topics. But what does it take to launch an impactful collection? To find out, we spoke with Ravinder Dahiya, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University and Editor in Chief of npj Flexible Electronics. Professor Dahiya has launched numerous article collections. Based on his extensive experience, he shares his insights into what makes a collection impactful.

Professor Dahiya leads the Bendable Electronics and Sustainable Technologies group, with research spanning flexible printed electronics, touch sensing, robotics, and wearable systems. His multidisciplinary background mirrors the expertise Springer Nature seeks in appointing guest editors: researchers with deep subject knowledge, strong community standing, and a clear editorial vision.

Editorial leadership researchers can trust

In the video, Professor Dahiya emphasises that impactful collections built around well-chosen, timely topics are shaped by experts who can bring together authoritative voices from across a field. This approach ensures that collections do more than aggregate papers. They tell a coherent story that advances understanding and supports future research.

For researchers and authors, this means confidence that collections are curated by leaders who understand both the science and the standards required to publish it responsibly

Publishing timely research that matters

Relevance and timing are critical to research impact. Professor Dahiya highlights a recent collection, Sustainable Flexible Electronics, as an example. The collection brought together work on semiconductor manufacturing and climate-focused technologies, two areas of growing urgency and global attention.

By exploring how flexible and printed electronics could help reduce carbon footprints while enabling continued innovation, the collection resonated widely across the research community.

Rigorous peer review as the foundation of quality

For authors and editors, the credibility of a journal or collection rests heavily on the strength of its peer review process. As Professor Dahiya makes clear, rigorous peer review is central to high quality publishing.

Guest editors are expected to select reviewers carefully. These should be researchers active in the field who can provide thoughtful, constructive, and expert feedback. Choosing the right reviewers for a collection not only safeguards standards but also helps authors strengthen their work.

“The quality of the papers we publish is highly dependent on the quality of reviews we get from the community,” Professor Dahiya notes. At Springer Nature, peer review is treated as a collaborative effort that benefits authors, readers, and the field as a whole.

Active editorial engagement at every stage

Beyond review quality, trust is built through editorial engagement and responsiveness. For authors, timely communication and clear guidance can define their publishing experience. For editors and guest editors, active involvement is essential to maintaining standards and momentum.

In the video, Professor Dahiya advises guest editors to stay engaged throughout the entire publication process, from initial submission and reviewer selection to evaluating feedback and guiding revisions. Adding editorial insight alongside reviewer comments helps ensure authors receive the best possible feedback and that final papers meet the expectations of the journal and its readership.

This level of care and oversight is a hallmark of Springer Nature collections.

A shared commitment to research integrity

What unites researchers, authors, guest editors, and editors is a shared commitment to advancing knowledge with integrity. Springer Nature’s role is to support that mission by providing a publishing environment built on trust, transparency, and rigour.

For researchers and authors, this means publishing in respected, widely read collections. For guest editors and editors, it means working with a publisher that values their expertise and supports them in delivering high quality outcomes. For readers, it means access to research they can rely on.

Watch the full conversation

Watch the full video to hear Ravinder Dahiya share from his experience on what makes a collection impactful.

If you are interested in becoming a guest editor or publishing your research in a Springer Nature collection, visit Springer Natures’ collections hub  to find out more.

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In the early 2000s, for most librarians, eBooks were a hassle. There were, and still are for most, issues like digital rights management (DRM) that limited what patrons could do with the books. There were hard access limits, limiting the number of people who could have a copy of the book at the same time. And all this, for a bunch of PDFs? But: What if things were different? What were librarians’ real, practical concerns? How could a publisher like Springer address them? Asking these questions began an open, frank, and ongoing dialogue with librarians, who described what they needed from a publisher for eBooks to deliver real value at scale.

Taking this feedback onboard, in 2005, Springer launched a new eBook approach built around these core needs: No DRM; access for multiple users and no limits on concurrent users; flexible use permissions and no limits on what readers could do with the eBook files. This new approach meant that eBooks’ power, to be shared and read and used with limits, was finally available, and it reflected how libraries already work with their academic communities. The result is that researchers and students can widely share Springer Nature eBooks and can easily use them in courses and in collaborations. This supports ongoing collaborations, discovery and learning across disciplines.  

Wendy Allen Shelburne, librarian at the University of Illinois, saw this model’s potential early on, and was among the first to sign up for this new way of doing eBooks. Her experience shows how librarians took an active role in shaping eBook evolution. On the occasion of looking back on the past 20 years of Springer Nature eBooks, I sat down with her to talk about her experience as an early eBook adopter. Keeping with the “book theme,” we looked at this like chapters: The rise of eBooks, the pandemic’s role as a catalyst, integrating eBooks into library services, shifting attitudes, and finally, a glimpse of the future.

Chapter 1:
The rise of eBooks in academic libraries

In 2006, it wasn’t obvious to everyone that eBooks were worth it, that they weren’t more work than they were worth, compared with traditional print books. “But nobody needs convincing anymore that eBooks are great, I get asked for them all the time now”, Shelburne points out.  

This shift in perception came gradually, as both librarians and users recognised the benefits and flexibility of digital resources. Especially when those eBooks don’t come with use restrictions or DRM. When buying one eBook license means everyone with library rights can get any book, at any time, and keep it forever. And, this includes textbooks. That means that if an assigned text is a Springer Nature eBook, students don’t have to pay out of pocket for it, and can keep the eBook file forever.  

Despite the internal adjustments required to make eBook acquisition work, Shelburne recalls the benefits of smoother access for students. “The joy of no longer getting printed lecture notes in computer science was...amazing and wonderful. It just became smooth sailing after a point in time”.   

Chapter 2:
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated eBook adoption  

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, and libraries closed during lockdowns, librarians were faced with an unprecedented challenge. This moment marked a turning point in how libraries operated, as Shelburne shares her experiences at that time. “The pandemic, in my opinion, was the watershed moment in all of this. The only way you could operate was with eBooks, and that really just changed it completely. Were it not for eBooks, I don’t know what anybody would have done.” 

Shelburne remembers her institution going through a tough time when they had to migrate their integrated library system during the pandemic. “We had to close our fiscal year in May, which is early, and then we had no system until late June. So, that meant in the pandemic we couldn’t put anything in the catalogue.” 

Despite technical challenges, eBooks remained a reliable source for education and research, transforming even the most resistant disciplines: “It really changed. The last disciplines that weren’t eBook heavy…was really the humanities.” Now, she remarks, “linguistics people are always asking for e-books. The history people are always asking for e-books.” 

Chapter 3:
Enhancing library services through eBook integration 

In addition to cataloguing metadata like MARC records, eBook files are, themselves, completely searchable. This means an entirely new findability experience for users. Where researchers once had to navigate complex catalogue systems with specific subject headings, today’s digital resources offer faster, intuitive discovery. “Keyword searching is so much easier than subject headings,” Shelburne comments. "Nobody would have that problem now.”   

This transformation also reshaped how researchers use their library. While students still fill in the building, their behaviour reflects the digital approach to education. “There’s still a lot of bodies in the library, but I don’t think they’re doing the same stuff that they did 20 years ago,” Shelburne remarks. “You’d probably have to go to the rare book room or archives map library to see significant engagement with print. Probably what you’re going to see is a student sitting with a lot of snacks and a laptop.” 

Even the traditional library spaces have been adapted. “We have lots of group study spaces now, which we wouldn’t have had before. Very different. You never see anybody walking around with a backpack full of books anymore.” 

Chapter 4:
The changing attitudes toward eBooks over time 

Not everyone embraced digital resources right away. One of the most telling anecdotes Shelburne shared involves a self-described “curmudgeon”, a retired professor, once known for his resistance to anything electronic. Shelburne remembers him refusing to open email attachments, insisting that everything be pasted directly into the body of an email. But retirement brought new needs, and a surprising change of heart.  

He reached out to her for help accessing electronic resources remotely. “We had a long conversation where I went through easy proxy, VPN and all these things. Making sure he knew how to do everything. And the day I saw him in the curmudgeon T-shirt, he was like, ‘Thank you so much. That was so amazingly helpful. I am having such a great time using all the electronic things’ And I'm like, yeah, I remember when you wouldn't open an email attachment.” This story is far from unique. “I think his story could probably be applied to lots of people. I fought it. I was curmudgeonly about it. I refused to do it. Look at me now."

This transformation reflects a broader pattern, highlight how necessity often becomes a catalyst for change: “The pandemic definitely knocked out a long tail of ‘I need to print it, I need to do this. 'And then it’s like, ‘Oh, I guess I don’t.’” 

Chapter 5:
The future of eBooks and libraries in a digital age

Looking ahead, Shelburne reflects on digital resources’ evolving roles in academic libraries. While eBooks have become essential, she wonders if traditional publishing formats will stay the same. “I’m surprised that publishing container still hasn’t moved much,” Shelburne observes. She imagines a future where the boundaries between books, chapters, and articles may blur, and where the concept of a “journal” or even a “book” could be redefined. “What does the journal look like in 20 years? Are there even still books in 20 years?” Another rapidly transforming area? Artificial intelligence (AI). While she sees potential in AI for tasks like text mining and systematic reviews, she remains cautiously sceptical.  

Despite the uncertainties, eBooks have proven their value, and their story is far from over. Librarians like Wendy Shelburne, with their adaptability, curiosity, and a touch of humour, help shape the future of knowledge access.

As we look ahead to the next 20 years, Springer Nature’s mission to support learning and discovery remains unchanged. You’ll find an illustrated history of the last 20 years of Springer Nature eBooks at our “virtual museum”, When the Shelf Went Digital... 20 Years of Springer Nature eBook Collections, where you can explore key milestones, insights from authors, librarians and experts, as well as the events shaping the future of knowledge and global impact. Take a stroll through the stories that defined the eBook journey and see what’s next.  

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For institutions and companies working with sensing technologies, the challenge is rarely a lack of research. Instead, it is keeping pace with developments in a field that evolves rapidly across disciplines, sectors and applications. Advances in sensing frequently move between foundational science and real‑world use, making it difficult to follow progress in a coherent way over time. The newest Nature Portfolio journal Nature Sensors is established to reflect this reality.  

The journal provides a dedicated forum for high‑quality research and industry‑relevant insight across sensing technologies, supporting organisations that need to track developments across use cases and over the long term. This approach is shaped by the perspective of Chief Editor Dr Olga Bubnova, whose background spans engineering physics, academic research and editorial leadership within the Nature Portfolio. As she notes, progress in sensing technologies often emerges where disciplines and sectors intersect. Bringing these perspectives together, she explains, helps clarify both where the field stands today and where it is heading next. 

Supporting organisations working across disciplines and sectors 

Research institutions and corporate R&D teams rarely operate within a single discipline. In sensing research, materials science, engineering, AI and data science are closely linked, and developments in one area often inform work in another. These connections can shape multiple research and development priorities at once.  

Nature Sensors reflects this way of working by publishing research from across the sensing landscape and emphasising work that remains relevant in more than one context. As Dr Bubnova puts it, “We look for research that people can return to and use in different ways, whether they’re approaching it from materials science, systems engineering or application development.” 

For universities, research institutes and companies, this joined‑up view supports longer‑term thinking about research directions, technology development and collaboration opportunities across sectors. 

Research across academic and industrial environments

Across sensing technologies, progress often depends on collaboration between academic and industrial research environments. Different teams contribute at different stages, from exploratory research through to system‑level development and applied use. From an editorial perspective, making these environments visible side by side reflects how the field advances. Many of the questions explored in sensing research are shared across sectors, and progress accelerates when these perspectives are connected rather than siloed. Bringing related work into conversation helps reveal how individual advances fit within a broader research picture.  

This approach is reflected in the range of topics represented in the journal, from sensing principles and AI‑enabled data analysis to applied systems in healthcare technologies, environmental monitoring, communications, robotics and autonomous systems. Together these contributions illustrate how sensing innovation develops through rich interaction between diverse research settings, following multiple interconnected pathways.

Connecting research, application and trust

Because sensing research often develops close to application, clarity and context are essential. Presenting academic and industrial perspectives together also helps place individual advances within the wider research landscape and shows how ideas move from concept to use. As Dr Bubnova observes, when research from different environments appears alongside one another, it becomes easier to understand how technologies progress through successive stages of development. 

Alongside this connection, trust in the research record remains critical. Across Springer Nature, AI tools support discovery, editorial processes and research integrity. Within Nature Sensors, these approaches contribute to clear and consistent review and publication practices. Consistency, Dr Bubnova notes, supports confidence in the literature, particularly for organisations that engage with research at scale. 

Publishing models aligned with institutional priorities

Publishing decisions across institutions and companies are shaped by the interplay of governance priorities, funding structures, and long‑term research strategy. Managing research outputs involves navigating access requirements, meeting compliance expectations and ensuring the ongoing integrity of the research record.

Within this context, Nature Sensors operates a hybrid publishing model that supports different organisational approaches under a single editorial framework. Subscription and open access options are treated as complementary routes, allowing institutions to align publication choices with policy and funding requirements while maintaining consistency in access and quality. 

From an editorial standpoint, this consistency is central. As Dr Bubnova explains, “Research may be published under different models, but it enters the literature with the same expectations around transparency, review and clarity. That’s important for organisations working across multiple policies and programmes.” For librarians and research managers, it supports informed decision‑making within a connected and accessible collection.  

A long‑term reference point for sensing research

Over time, Nature Sensors is intended to serve as a central resource for institutions and companies following developments across sensing technologies, including emerging areas such as quantum sensing, wearable innovations and data‑driven sensing systems. The journal draws research from diverse disciplines and sectors into a cohesive perspective on work relevant to healthcare, environmental monitoring and complex connected systems. As Dr Bubnova notes, when research is shared in ways that help organisations learn from each other and trace the links between ideas across the field, it strengthens understanding of the future direction of sensing technologies and their potential applications.

If you’d like to learn more about Nature Sensors or explore other journals in the Nature Portfolio that relate to your organisation’s work, our resources offer an overview of what each publication covers and how they connect to different areas of research.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is now a central part of the research landscape, actively shaping how studies are written, reviewed and shared. For research institutions, this evolution opens up exciting opportunities to boost efficiency, advance discovery, and offer researchers powerful new forms of support. It also introduces important areas for consideration, including policy, ethics, integrity and training. With thoughtful planning, institutions can make the most of AI’s strengths, reinforce trust in science, and empower researchers to thrive.

If you’re shaping AI strategies for your institution, you’re facing both an enormous opportunity and a fast-moving set of challenges. That’s why global experts from academia, publishing and research policy came together at Springer Nature’s Korea Research Advisory Forum (KRAF) 2025, to share practical insights on how AI can be integrated into scholarly communication responsibly and effectively. This blog turns those insights into clear guidance for research institutions, helping you confidently shape AI strategies that support your researchers, strengthen trust and prepare your organisation for the future.

What AI means for institutional integrity

We all know AI is speeding up research workflows, from literature searches to drafting manuscripts, and that speed isn’t just a challenge; it’s a major opportunity. Opening the discussion at KRAF 2025, Nick Campbell, Springer Nature’s Vice President for Academic Affairs, reminded everyone that AI isn’t new to publishing, though we’ve never seen it at this scale or level of sophistication before. ‘We’ve been thinking about AI since the 1960s,’ he noted, pointing out that the company’s first experiment, a book generated by an early summarisation tool in 2019, predates today’s large language models. Now, those models can provide broader support, for example by helping researchers summarise literature, structure arguments, or polish text, although it's important to note that responsibility and final control must remain entirely with the author.

With AI advancing so quickly and the pros and cons becoming more prevalent, the rise in AI-generated submissions is prompting a wave of new editorial tools, policies and detection methods. Rather than overwhelming editors, this shift can empower them with better systems for identifying low-quality or fabricated work, ultimately raising the bar for what gets published. Campbell emphasised that the goal isn’t about limiting AI’s potential, but about using it responsibly. Springer Nature’s stance focuses on detecting misuse, reinforcing trust, and ensuring accountability throughout the research process. “AI is an assistant; humans make the decisions,” he said, where AI continues to enhance human expertise without replacing it, and where the industry can build more rigorous and efficient publishing workflows than ever before.

But what does this mean for institutions? It’s a chance for institutions to lead. As highlighted in our Perspectives on AI in scholarly communications report, providing researchers with clear, practical guidance on when and how to use AI responsibly helps strengthen research integrity, build confidence across your organisation, and support better collaboration with publishers. By setting thoughtful AI policies now, institutions can position themselves as proactive leaders shaping a more efficient, collaborative and trusted research future.

How editors are responding and what institutions can learn

Editors from Korean society journals have observed a noticeable rise in AI‑supported submissions, reflecting how quickly generative tools are being adopted across the research community. Many of these papers draw on readily available open datasets, creating new challenges for editorial teams as they assess quality and rigour. Institutions can help ease this pressure by updating internal review processes and giving researchers the training they need. It’s also worth exploring publisher tools, like AI‑powered integrity checks, to catch problems early and prevent poor‑quality submissions from slipping through the net.

The evolving needs of researchers in a changing landscape

Laura Schmid, Chief Editor at Nature Reviews Computing (previously Editor at Nature Communications), shared some revealing survey results that highlight just how quickly researcher behaviour is shifting. Almost every researcher who has experimented with AI reports finding it genuinely helpful, whether for speeding up literature searches, supporting coding tasks, or helping with early stage writing and structuring ideas. And even those who haven’t taken the leap yet recognise its growing relevance; many expect AI to become a routine part of research workflows in the near future. Enthusiasm for AI is accompanied by a growing awareness of key considerations, including bias in the data fed into AI models, bias that can become embedded in those models and reflected in their outputs, as well as concerns around data quality, accuracy, and environmental impact. These insights point to a research community that approaches AI with curiosity and optimism, embracing its potential while maintaining a strong commitment to responsible use.

“Researchers find AI useful, but integrity and sustainability must lead.” - Laura Schmid, Chief Editor at Nature Reviews Computing (previously Editor at Nature Communications)

Experts at KRAF highlighted that effective and responsible AI use is strengthened by context. As Prof. JK Seong, Seoul National University explained, biological and environmental variability adds important nuance to scientific findings, and when AI tools are designed to reflect this complexity, they can deepen insights and support strong reproducibility.

These perspectives show that as researchers become more aware of both the benefits and the complexities of AI, from embedded bias to the need for contextualised models, institutions have a key role in helping them use these tools responsibly and in ways that strengthen scientific integrity and open new avenues of discovery.

Envisioning interactive and open research

The forum concluded by highlighting Springer Nature’s vision for more open and interactive research, including the possibility for readers to dynamically interrogate research data, such as filtering results by specific conditions.

“AI can help us move toward more open, reproducible, and interactive research, but integrity must lead the way.” - Nick Campbell, Vice President, Academic Affairs at Springer Nature

Institutions have a meaningful opportunity to shape the future of open science by using publisher tools that bring transparency into everyday workflows. This dedication helps strengthen trust and supports research in advancing with clarity and momentum.

The bigger picture of building trust in a digital age

Researchers, publishers and institutions all share a commitment to maintaining strong confidence in scholarly communication, which calls for embedding human‑centred values such as fairness, accountability and transparency throughout the research process and throughout the implementation of AI. When institutions champion these principles, they strengthen research integrity and open the door to new possibilities for discovery, collaboration and innovation.

As institutions shape their AI strategies, they have a meaningful opportunity to guide the research community toward responsible and confident adoption. Springer Nature’s AI & Integrity hubs offer practical frameworks, tools and shared insights to support this work. The Link gives institutions access to peer insights that help refine and improve research workflows.

To support this evolution, institutions may wish to focus on the following areas:

• Develop clear, institution-wide AI policies covering authorship, disclosure, peer review, and data governance.
• Provide practical training and workshops to build researchers’ confidence in responsible AI use, transparent reporting, and critical evaluation.
• Equip researchers with guidance on ethical standards, including quality, bias mitigation, reproducibility, and best practices for AI-assisted research.
• Promote transparency by encouraging detailed reporting and clear disclosure of AI-assisted writing, analysis, and workflow steps.
• Collaborate closely with publishers to stay informed about emerging integrity risks, expectations, and evolving AI policies.
• Use the outputs from publisher screening and integrity checks, such as plagiarism reports or data‑availability assessments, to help strengthen internal review processes.
• Champion context-aware, scientifically grounded AI tools that support robust research design and reflect real-world complexity.
• Advance open science practices by embedding transparency and reproducibility into everyday research workflows.

For institutions looking to evolve their AI thinking with confidence, The Link and the AI & Integrity hubs provide supportive places to gather insights, hear from peers and deepen understanding at your own pace.

About the Korean Research Advisory Forum (KRAF)

Meeting the evolving expectations of the research community requires ongoing collaboration with institutional leaders. After launching the US Research Advisory Council in 2021, this collaborative model expanded in 2024 with the Korean Research Advisory Forum, uniting experts from across academia to share perspectives and shape future priorities. The forum members are listed below (in alphabetical order):

•    Changmo Sung, Director, Mission PM Center, Korea ARPA-H
•    Chulhong Kim, Professor, Pohang University of Science and Technology
•    Heisook Lee, President, GISTeR
•    Henry Hee-Seung Bom, Professor, Chonnam National University
•    Jae Sung Lee, Professor, Seoul National University
•    Je Kyung Seong, Professor, Seoul National University
•    Jooyoung Park, Associate Professor, Seoul National University
•    Ki Tae Nam, Professor, Seoul National University
•    Mijin Yun, Professor, Yonsei University College of Medicine
•    Sang Yup Lee, Professor, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
•    Sun Huh, Professor, Hallym University 
•    William Jo, Professor, Ewha Womans University
•    Woojung Jang, CEO, AI Star
•    Wooyoung Shim, Professor, Yonsei University
•    Yongsik Ok, Professor, Korea University

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This article was originally published in 2019 and was last updated in November 2025.

Did you know that it has been 15 years since Springer published its first open access (OA) book? To commemorate this landmark, we feature the story of our first OA book and the benefits of publishing open access. 

A year before the official launch of its OA books programme in August 2012, Springer published its first OA book: Future Internet Assembly 2011: Achievements and Technological Promises. Alfred Hofmann, then editor and now retired since 2020, describes the challenges of creating the first OA book.
 

“The project was difficult to realize within Springer as nobody had experience regarding OA book publishing at that time.”

This was before many publishers had begun to offer OA for books. But there was a definite need to support OA publication: 

“The Future Internet Assembly series was a sequence of conferences sponsored by the European Community, which already at that time advocated OA publication of research results developed with EC-sponsored activities.“

- Alfred Hofmann, Former VP at Springer in 2017
 

“Open access is a requirement for all projects funded by Horizon 2020 […] so it was imperative to use the open access model in order to obtain a sufficient large number and high quality contributions from authors.” 

- Anastasius Gavras, contributing editor of Future Internet Assembly 2011 

With this need in mind, Springer challenged the status quo, successfully changing internal workflows and establishing a pricing model through a book processing charge (BPC), as well as approving use of a Creative Commons license so that Gavras and co-editors could publish Future Internet Assembly 2011 in compliance with their funder’s OA policy. 

Experiencing the benefits of open access 

Compliance with funder requirements is just one of the many reasons for publishing a book open access. There are many benefits for an author choosing to publish their research as an OA book, from increased discoverability and visibility, immediate online access, widened readership outside of their traditional research community, increased potential for collaboration, or career progression. Gavras confirmed that in the case of Future Internet Assembly 2011: 

“Open access contributed to increased visibility of the published works, and to the level of citations per chapter.” 

Open access at Springer 

In addition to Springer Nature Link, our comprehensive online delivery platform, all Springer Nature open access books and chapters are listed in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and, where appropriate, PubMed’s NCBI Bookshelf. We also work with Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. Inclusion on these sites enhances the visibility and discoverability of authors’ work. As a result, open access books on Springer Nature Link receive 10x the downloads, 2.4x the citations, and 10x the online mentions of our non-OA books.  

Our OA books reach readers in 61% more countries globally than our non-OA books, and a majority of these additional countries are low and middle-low income countries. See paper/infographics here. For example, the Future Internet Assembly 2011 has now reached over a million downloads and almost 70 citations via Springer Nature Link.  

According to the download data available from the book’s homepage, this works out at around 1,116,665 downloads of the full book (as of 31 January 2026). Gavras has since published further open access books with Springer for these reasons.

Open access books today

Since its launch fifteen years ago, Springer Nature has published over 4,000 open access books across its Springer, Palgrave and Apress imprints, covering a wide range of disciplines within science, technology, medicine, humanities and social sciences.  The notable open access books list includes author Gerard t’Hooft, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics and co-author Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and winner of the 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award. 

Springer Nature OA books are subject to the same high level peer-review, production and publishing processes followed by traditional Springer Nature books and they are freely and immediately available online for anyone to download. The BPC covers all the costs of commissioning, copyediting, proofreading, production, dissemination and promotion. Readers worldwide can share and reuse books and chapters published open access using the applied Creative Commons License, ensuring maximum reuse as well as enabling authors to retain copyright for their work.
 

Interested in experiencing the benefits of open access publishing? 
Get in touch with a Springer, Palgrave, or Apress publishing editor to find out more.

Despite rapid digitalisation, research workflows often remain fragmented. Disconnected tools and data create unnecessary friction for labs and teams. In this blog, three data‑driven innovators explore why interoperability matters, the challenges labs face today and what more connected workflows could enable.

Every day, research teams lose valuable time and insights because their systems don’t connect as they should. Data sits in proprietary formats, workflows don’t quite line up, and sharing information across teams is harder than it needs to be. These everyday frictions often go unnoticed, yet they quietly slow down research and innovation. At a time when speed, transparency and reproducibility matter more than ever, such inefficiencies can have real consequences.

This is why interoperable workflows are moving onto the strategic agenda for digital labs. When tools, systems and data are able to work together, organizations can streamline research processes, collaborate more effectively and produce results that are both robust and scalable. To better understand how this shift is taking shape, we spoke with three experts at Springer Nature: Rob Padilla, Product Director, Digital Life Science Solutions; Emma Ganley, Director of Strategic Initiatives at protocols.io; and Prathik Roy, Product Director, Data Solutions & Strategy. They share their perspectives on why interoperability matters, the practical challenges labs face today, and how publishers and technology providers can help build more connected research environments.

Breaking down barriers to release value

As we’ve seen, siloed activity risks slowing the rate of discovery and innovation. This isn’t to say there’s no place left in the lab for modular platforms so long as they’re integrated well to avoid fragmentation. Modularity provides the flexibility to maximise internal efficiency without disrupting the entire system.

Interoperable systems on the other hand extend a platform’s reach seamlessly across tools, systems and organisations. What were once isolated tools are transformed into a connected ecosystem. And the benefits are immense. Digital lab operations are smarter and faster, generating more reproducible results. All of which leads to better collaboration and decision-making, increasing efficiencies and ultimately greater speed to market.

Achieving interoperable workflows is not a straightforward process though, as Rob Padilla points out. “Many big organisations are very complex and could potentially have many different ELNs at different locations, with formats that aren’t interoperable. If you want to export from an ELN to a different company or team, this will really hold you back. And this is an ongoing problem; when applications were originally designed, the main objective was “does it work?”. They were never built with interoperability in mind, but now people want digital product ecosystems.”

Emma Ganley agrees. She points out that tool providers need to bear these developments in mind. “They need a holistic view of what they’re offering, and how all these tools work together.”

Interoperable systems – key elements

Interoperable research environments are built on a small number of core capabilities that allow systems, data and teams to work seamlessly together. These elements provide the technical and organisational foundations for integrated workflows, trusted data use and collaboration at scale. The sections below highlight three key components that support connected digital labs in practice.

1. APIs driving integration across R&D systems

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) play a central role in the connected lab environment. They act as a communication layer, allowing different systems to talk to each other in a format they can all understand. They’re the glue that holds together all the components of the digital lab, making it a cohesive whole.

“APIs play a crucial role in busting siloes,” says Prathik Roy. “A big pharmaceutical company will have all the major sources of data, but they need to make sense of it all. APIs enable them to integrate content directly into their lab environment, which bypasses the barriers they would otherwise encounter looking for solutions externally.”

This is where publishers play their part in promoting interoperability. “Corporate organisations want content in machine-readable format, and they need the interoperability to ingest the content with their AI systems such as ELNs,” says Prathik. “Springer Nature have created APIs for the integration of their vast collection of healthcare and medicine articles, personalised for the pharma/healthcare space. We enrich the content by annotating it, so relevant information can be easily extracted.”

2. Open data is the power behind connected research ecosystems

Lack of standardization has been a persistent challenge since data sharing began. As recently as 5 to 10 years ago, microscopy image data was notoriously difficult to access due to vendors’ proprietary file types, creating enormous problems for researchers and labs. The advent of open (FAIR) data and open-source tools was a major factor in resolving the issue.

“The concept of FAIR data is really big, and informs the discussion,” says Rob. “It’s a set of principles designed to improve reproducibility, stating that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.” He adds that FAIR data has lately come to mean Fully AI Ready as well. “Any AI system is only as good as the data going into it. High quality data going in is the foundation for good quality information coming out.”

Prathik adds that Springer Nature’s role is critical to healthcare and medicine. “You could build a drug discovery pipeline built on misinformation. Having access to proper, peer-reviewed data is vital for AI in medicine.”

3. Collaboration is driving speed and scalability in the cloud

These common principles are a foundation for trustworthy, scalable and efficient science. They facilitate collaboration by reducing ambiguity and making it easier for teams across disciplines, institutions or countries to share and integrate their data.

Cloud-based platforms are an essential element of the collaborative digital lab. They accelerate communication by allowing teams to work together seamlessly in real time, no matter where they’re located. Researchers at a global biotech company can simultaneously review experimental data, update project notes and adjust workflows, allowing discoveries and development cycles to progress more quickly and accurately. The result? Faster iteration and speed to market.

Building a future-ready digital lab for scalable innovation

Together, APIs, open data and cloud‑based collaboration provide the foundations for interoperable digital labs. When these elements work in combination, they support workflows that connect systems, enable data reuse and help teams collaborate effectively across platforms and locations. Applying shared standards, including FAIR principles, supports environments that can evolve alongside research needs.

Interoperable and well‑structured data environments contribute to consistency across research processes. Accessible, well‑integrated data supports reproducible results and enables researchers to build on existing work with confidence. This emphasis on reliability underpins scientific progress and supports innovation at scale as research continues to become more data‑driven.

Gain further insights into reproducibility and interoperability

Across research environments, interoperability takes shape through everyday decisions about how systems connect, how data is structured and how teams collaborate. From APIs that link tools and content, to open data practices and cloud‑based platforms, these approaches help research workflows come together in a more coherent way. The result is an environment where data can be reused with confidence, collaboration is woven into day‑to‑day work, and reproducibility remains central across the research lifecycle.

For those interested in exploring these ideas further, the white paper Reproducibility in the Life Sciences looks more closely at how reproducible research practices are developing across the life sciences community. You can also find more information on Springer Nature’s platforms and services, which are designed to support connected workflows and the reliable use of research content within digital lab environments.

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A combination of regulatory reforms and research funding and investment in China has created a situation where a group of Chinese companies have full pipelines, but need partners to market those drugs beyond Greater China. AdisInsight’s recent report, Strategic Pharma Insights: Asia Focus Part I: China’s Movers and Shakers, details 10 of these companies and their pipelines, but I wanted to take a more holistic view of how this is playing out, by looking at the forces driving this, some key pipeline highlights, and the opportunities for global pharma companies  

China advances from generics to biotech leadership

How would a country like China transform its pharmaceutical sector from a generics-manufacturing “back office” mainstay to an innovation powerhouse? Starting in 2015, and continuing in 2020, China took active steps to reform its regulatory and clinical trials processes, making them, at a minimum, competitive with the rest of the world. In 2015, China instituted its “Opinions on the Reform of Review and Approval Process for Drugs and Medical Devices,” and took a further step in 2020 with the revision of the “Provisions for Drug Registration.” These introduced expedited pathways for priority review, conditional approvals, and breakthrough therapy designations, and shortened development timelines and reduced regulatory bottlenecks.   

These reforms particularly stimulated development of drugs using newer technologies like monoclonal and bispecific antibodies, chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) approaches, and others, that are showing great promise in dealing with previously intransigent diseases (pancreatic cancer, for example). Moreover, these reforms have given investors increased confidence in China-developed therapies, helping these companies attract and develop global partnerships.  

And while China’s rapidly evolving biotech and pharma sector is having great success with therapeutics, many of these companies lack the global marketing footprint needed to bring these new drugs to the patients around the world who need them. This combination means opportunities for global and US/EU-based companies to partner with Chinese firms to bring these badly needed medicines to the world.   

Combined with investments in research, and in companies commercialising that research, China is now home to a collection of biotech and pharmaceutical companies with portfolios of approved or late-stage therapies for treating life threatening diseases.   

The report, Strategic Pharma Insights: Asia Focus Part I: China’s Movers & Shakers, looks at 10 of these firms, highlighting key compounds in their portfolios, along with these companies’ strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for global pharmaceutical companies. The report profiles the following companies: Akeso, 3SBio, Insilico Medicine, Sinopharm, Innovent Biologics, Legend Biotech, WuXi Biologic, Duality Biologics, Sciwind Biosciences and Lepu Pharma.

Rising successes in China’s late‑stage biologics

Many of the therapeutics in late development or on the market come from advanced biotech categories, especially breakthrough therapies or expedited review. These include monoclonal and bispecific antibodies or other biologics treating cancer, metabolic disorders, or autoimmune disorders, some of the most difficult disease states to treat.

For example, Akeso’s lung cancer bispecific antibody, Ivonescimab, outperformed Merck’s Keytruda for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), giving patients more than 11 months without progression, as compared to Keytruda’s 5.8 months. But Keytruda’s first-mover advantage combined with Merck’s global marketing footprint has kept Keytruda as the market leader, despite Ivonescimab better efficacy.

Another example: Sinopharm Group’s explosive growth, moving to the 4th strongest pharmaceutical company (up from 13th) on the strength of its herpes zoster mRNA vaccine, a joint venture with Lonza, and its pivotal role in global COVID-19 vaccine development.

Innovent Biologics has both a GLP-1 compound (mazdutide) already approved, as well as its foothold in oncology with sintillmab.

Other key developments include:

• 3SBio has signed a landmark licensing deal (up to $6B) with Pfizer for SSGJ‑707 (PD‑1/VEGF bispecific), granting global rights outside China and setting up planned Phase III programs internationally.   
• Insilico Medicine is pioneering AI‑driven drug discovery that is boosting R&D productivity and feeding assets into global development; the references include recent financing that underpins these programs.   
• Innovent Biologics has secured China approval for Sycume (teprotumumab biosimilar) in thyroid eye disease; expanded internationally via Roche collaborations and a $1.2B Takeda agreement covering late‑stage oncology assets outside Greater China.   
• Legend Biotech is advancing innovative CAR-T programs with strategic collaborations (e.g., Janssen, Novartis), drawing strong global investor attention.   
• WuXi Biologics achieved EMA approval at its Dundalk, Ireland site enabling first commercial launch there, and passed FDA pre‑license inspections across multiple Wuxi facilities, strengthening global dual‑sourcing and trial support.   
• Duality Biologics (DualityBio) reported Phase III success (with BioNTech’s BNT323) in HER2‑positive breast cancer and licensing (DB‑1418) alongside a successful Hong Kong IPO, evidence of late‑stage momentum with antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs).   
• Sciwind Biosciences has signed a $70M upfront global licensing (outside China & South Korea) with Verdiva Bio for ecnoglutide and amylin receptor agonists, with up to $2.4B in milestones, positioning metabolic assets for wider trials.   
• Lepu Biopharma is advancing an ADC pipeline with a major licensing deal for MRG007 and presented preclinical data at AACR 2025; also out‑licensed TOPAbody T‑cell engager assets to Excalipoint with significant milestone potential.

China’s biotech momentum expands global R&D paths

China’s rapid transformation into a global innovation hub offers R&D teams a unique window of opportunity. With regulatory reforms streamlining approvals and enabling faster development cycles, Chinese biopharma companies are now advancing cutting‑edge biologics, AI‑driven discovery programs, and late‑stage oncology and metabolic assets that increasingly match global standards. These shifts are strengthening China’s position as a vital source of inventive pipelines, attracting investment and expanding its contribution to global drug development portfolios. 

For global R&D leaders, this means earlier access to differentiated assets, the potential to accelerate clinical progress through China’s faster and more scalable trial infrastructure, and new avenues for co-development with companies whose scientific capabilities have grown rapidly. At a strategic level, China’s maturing biotech ecosystem signals a shift from viewing the region as a manufacturing base to integrating it as a core component of global innovation planning, portfolio diversification and long-term competitive advantage.

To explore these trends in more depth and understand how China’s evolving biotech landscape could shape your long‑term R&D strategy, dive into the full Strategic Pharma Insights: Asia Focus Part I: China’s Movers & Shakers report, where company profiles, pipeline analyses, and market data provide a clearer view of the opportunities ahead.

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