Open data

We believe that data should be open, accessible and reusable. Open access to knowledge (both datasets and research papers) inherently facilitates interdisciplinary research and pushes the boundaries of discovery.

Many researchers are motivated to share their data but are often face with challenges in doing so. As a publisher we want to advance discovery and drive the development of open research by supporting data sharing and accessibility.

Questions about open data?

Please contact us.

How can we support you?

Research Data Support

Our new service, Research Data Support, helps authors share their research outputs more efficiently.

Data policies

Find out more about our data policies. These reduce the complexity of data availability requirements to four simple types.

For institutions and funders

Interested in research data services for your institution? Learn more about how we can work together to support your institutional aims.

Research Data community

Be part of the research data conversation. You'll find blog posts from experts, discussion threads and research data resources.

Data helpdesk

Our helpdesk provides free advice on sharing or publishing your research data, including adhering to policies and finding repositories.

Whitepaper: Practical challenges for researchers in data sharing

Springer Nature published a white paper Practical challenges for researchers in data sharing on 21 March 2018.

Based one of the largest surveys of researchers about research data, this report finds widespread data sharing associated with published works and a desire from researchers that their data are discoverable.

The volume of respondents to the survey (over 7,700 researchers responded) enables this report to explore data sharing behaviours and challenges from regional, subject and seniority perspectives. 

Read the whitepaper


Access and download the full whitepaper and associated survey data

Why openly share research data?

Community involvement

We work with the scientific community in a variety of ways to improve data management and publication:

  • Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Head of Data Publishing at Springer Nature, is co-chair of the Research Data Alliance interest group on Data Policy Standardisation and Implementation
  • Amye Kenall, Global Head of Life Sciences at BMC, is a member of the FORCE11 committe
  • We have represented publishers in the Industry Advisory Committee of Elixir, a major EU bioinformatics data infrastructure project

Data publications

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

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

BMC Research Notes publishes dark data - single observations, short null results, orphan data and confirmatory results, among others. We believe this data can contribute to developments in the scientific field, so we launched BMC Research Notes to give it a home. The ‘data note’ article type offers authors a peer-reviewed, citeable summary of their data.

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