Why Springer Nature is not afraid of the ‘sharing’ culture

Author: Susie Winter

Vice President External Communications

Academic publishing and the wider research community is no stranger to adapting to and harnessing technological changes. Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web to enable scientists to share information digitally. Academic Publishers were then the first branch of publishing to fully embrace the benefits of digital content creation and distribution. Over the last decade Springer Nature has digitised over seven million articles and more than 240,000 books so that they can be held in perpetuity and accessed for the advancement of science around the globe.  

Despite Sir Tim’s intentions we, as an industry, have been too slow to embrace the full opportunities ‘digital’ presents to researchers, not just in how they access content but in how they can use the content they have access to.

This is where Springer Nature’s focus and investment has been in recent years. In taking responsibility for publishing an author’s research, our primary duty is to make that research as widely discoverable, accessible, understandable, usable, reusable and shareable as possible.

For too long ‘sharing’ has been a difficult word in academic publishing. Publishers encouraged authors to share their articles, but these were often in sub-optimal ways, with readers unable to access the content they needed. This led researchers to sharing articles in ‘dark’ ways which could not be tracked; meaning publishers could not measure and report on their usage to authors or the institutional libraries that were ultimately paying for access to this content.

 It could be argued that such reticence was understandable given the need to protect and sustain the significant investment publishers make in their authors and their manuscripts. From providing editorial guidance and rigorous quality assurance processes, including peer review to the publication of the research itself, and the maintenance and development of their access platforms.   

“No longer does our work stop at publication; it is where the next phase of our responsibility begins” 

But at Springer Nature we try to think differently. Fundamentally we believe we work at the behest of our authors. The ability to share their work, access works of others, and know where and how their work is being used is now critical to the life of a researcher; therefore it needs to be critical to us as well. No longer does our work stop at publication; it is where the next phase of our responsibility begins.

Beyond publication

With this belief in sharing now embedded across the company, we have focused on two main areas that we view as crucial to aiding our authors.

First, by providing more ways to publish open access. 

In recent years options to speed up the dissemination of research have increased, driven by digital advance and developments in open science as initially evidenced by the launch of BioMed Central as the first commercially viable open access publisher in 2000 and more recently by the rapid expansion of Springer Nature’s OA choices. With more and more funders stipulating the need to publish open access as a requirement to receive their funding it is beholden on publishers to ensure this is possible and Springer Nature has been the fastest and most effective in delivering on this need. 

 I am delighted that Springer Nature has risen to this challenge and today offers the most open access options to authors of research articles and more of them utilise this than with any other publisher. Approximately 27% of all research published by us is now published open access. Where the corresponding author is from the UK, nearly 80% of articles we publish by the end of the year will have been published Gold OA: meaning the research is immediately openly accessible.

We have also developed SharedIt, underlining our commitment to enabling new research findings to be read by those who support and enable research, by those who help apply the findings for the benefit of all, as well as the interested wider public.

SharedIt allows authors to post links to view-only, full-text subscription research articles anywhere - including social media, author websites, scholarly collaboration networks, institutional repositories, even via email allowing the sharing of research among colleagues and general audiences. SharedIt was rolled out to all of the Springer Nature-owned journals and over one thousand additional co-owned and partner-owned journals in October 2016 and now covers over 2,300 journals. I’m proud that in the first half of 2017 it facilitated 3m article shares, so it’s clearly valued by the research community.

"We are not publishing ground-breaking research to see it unused."

In addition to enabling content sharing by authors and subscribers, SharedIt also facilitates the sharing of research to  wider communities by enabling over 200media outlets and blogs to link to free-to-read versions of research articles.. Many outlets on thislist are aimed at the public, including the BBC, The Economist, WIRED and The New York Times, along with many leading science bloggers.

So when people ask whether we as a publisher are scared about the amount of sharing going on, our response is simply ‘the more the better’, providing it is done in ways that enable us to fulfil our responsibilities to our authors and to institutional libraries. We are not publishing ground-breaking research to see it unused. We want to advance discovery by allowing the up to date scientific record to be accessed, shared, used and re-used, and allow authors and librarians to track usage across an increasingly fragmented collection of platforms and we will continue developing new ways to enable this to happen.