The Springer Nature Editorial Advisory Group (SNEAG) oversees editorial standards and policies across all brands, acting to ensure consistency with sector best practice. SNEAG works closely with the Springer Nature Research Integrity Group (SNRIG) which supports editors to resolve publication ethics issues in a COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)-compliant manner.

Concerns: to report an integrity or ethics issue related to Springer Nature content, please contact the relevant product. Contact details can be found on journal- and book-specific websites.

Springer Nature Research Integrity Team

The SNRIG takes a positive and proactive approach to preventing and addressing errors and misconduct. They work to raise awareness of best practice and ethical conduct in research, investigate unethical practices, provide training and investigation resources, act as an advisory service for staff and editors, and audit Springer Nature’s own editorial practices and policies. The Director of the SNRIG is Chris Graf.

Chris Graf

Director

Advisory and Assurance

This branch of the SNRIG creates training resources for internal staff and external editors, authors and reviewers. They also proactively investigate patterns of research misconduct using various tools including auditing. This branch comprises:

Tamara Welschot,
Head of Advisory and Assurance
Jo Appleford-Cook,
Training Manager
John Bell, Adam Rajah,
Research Integrity Advisers

Issue Handling

This branch of the SNRIG handles reported issues across the whole of Springer Nature that require the input of research integrity experts. This branch comprises:

Tim Kersjes,
Research Integrity Manager
Maja Choma, Pauline Starley,
Senior Research Integrity Advisers
Elizabeth Debney, Greta Lazutkaite, Laura Whitehead,
Research Integrity Advisers

Ensuring the integrity of our publications

At Springer Nature ensuring the quality of what we publish is imperative. Watch the video to find out more about the process we follow when an issue has been detected on a manuscript.

COPE

Springer Nature and its journals are members of COPE (the Committee On Publication Ethics). COPE’s primary mission is educational; it is an advisory body, not a regulator. There are more than 12,500 COPE members from 103 countries. Springer Nature’s Research Integrity Director, Suzanne Farley, is a member of COPE’s Board of Trustees. Our Research Integrity Group works closely with COPE to help them develop new educational resources

COPE membership helps differentiate legitimate journals from the increasing number of predatory and poor-quality outlets. It is one of the indicators of quality used by important third parties such as Clarivate Analytics (for Journal Impact Factor) and indexers (e.g. Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, PubMed). Maintaining COPE membership depends on adhering to the best-practice standards that they set.

In addition to the COPE Core Practices, there are flowcharts and Guidelines which help Editors solve common editorial problems. COPE also supports book editors with issues related to publication ethics.

Reproducibility

Reproducibility is a tenet of research integrity. Springer Nature participates in a number of initiatives that help drive the reproducibility agenda forward. Here are just a few examples:

Research data services

Springer Nature has a team of data editors that offers free advice to researchers on how and where to share their data. Assistance curating datasets to make them useful and findable, and getting due credit for data sharing, is also available.

Peer review and publication of code

Many Springer Nature research journals encourage researchers who submit papers that rely on bespoke software to provide the programs for peer review. A code and software submission checklist to help authors compile and present code for peer review is available.

Minimal Standards Working Group

A working group of journal editors and other experts has been convened, with the aim of agreeing a minimal set of reporting standards for research in the life sciences. The collective experience of journals― for example, with Nature Research’s reporting summary―is being leveraged in this cross-publisher collaboration.

Transparency

Springer Nature helps authors share their work early and widely, and is working to open up the ‘black box’ of peer review. We support preprint deposition and citation, and multiple models of peer review.

In Review

A first-of-its-kind prepublication platform that shines new light on submission, peer review and editorial processes. In Review enables authors to easily track the status of their manuscript while it’s out for review, as well as share it for community comment early in the editorial process.

Portable Peer Review

For papers that have been rejected by another journal after peer review, BMC Biology invites authors to submit those peer-review reports with their paper. For papers rejected after peer review at BMC Biology, the journal will transfer peer-review reports to any journal of the authors’ choice.

Under Consideration

At Nature Communications, authors can choose to include a link to a preprint of any paper of theirs that is being peer reviewed by the journal on a public list. Authors that haven't already deposited their paper in a preprint server can post their paper once alerted to formal peer review by Nature Communications.

Links to Preprints

Authors who publish in Nature Machine Intelligence can choose to add a link back to recognised community preprint platforms arXiv or bioRxiv from their published paper.