Open data

We believe that data should be open, accessible and reusable. Data sharing helps speed up the pace of discovery and its benefits to society.

As a proactive partner to the research community, Springer Nature is pioneering new approaches to data sharing and open data. We’re committed to supporting researchers in sharing their data, helping to make data sharing the new normal.

Featured white papers and reports

We monitor data sharing attitudes and behaviours, building evidence and advocating for good data practice. Discover our latest white papers and reports:

Why openly share research data?

Community involvement

We work with the scientific community in a variety of ways to improve data management and publication. We also support a number of education and best practice initiatives.

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Grace Baynes (steering committee) 

Rebecca Grant (working group), Co-chair, Humanities policy development group and Co-chair, Social Sciences policy development group

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Rebecca Grant, Interest group co-chair (Data Policy Standardisation and Implementation)

Varsha Khodiyar, Interest group co-chair (Professionalizing Data Stewardship Interest Group) and Working group co-chair (FAIRsharing Registry: Connecting data policies, standards and databases RDA working group)

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Varsha Khodiyar, Executive Advisor

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Varsha Khodiyar, Member of the International Data Policy Committee (IDPC)

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Rebecca Grant, Member of the Research Data Publishing Ethics group

Data publishing

Through data publishing, we aim to make scientific data more reusable, discoverable, interpretable, and citable.

We facilitate data publishing in open access journals Scientific Data and BMC Research Notes; through Registered Reports in BMC journals; and pilot projects on data citation and data badges.

Springer Nature’s flagship open data journal, Scientific Data, offers authors the opportunity to describe and share their research data with a wide audience. 

BMC Research Notes publishes dark data - single observations,
short null results, orphan data and confirmatory results. The
‘data note’ article type offers authors a peer-reviewed, citeable
summary of their data.

Our Research Data Helpdesk helps authors and editors find out how best to deal with their data and understand funder and institute mandates. With journal-level Research Data Policies, we ensure that the data at the heart of scholarly research are appropriately archived and, where possible, widely accessible.

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