News & Initiatives

Learn how open access agreements support open research, their benefits and impact for participating institutions, librarians, and researchers, including practical supporting tools.

Libraries are leading the way to open access, and their pivotal role is shaping transformative agreements for global OA publishing. Read how librarians vet venues, centralize OA funds, and expand coverage to 6 continents, and are driving OA forward for researchers.

This blog focuses on just a few of the steps Springer Nature has taken towards making it easier for researchers, health professionals, and others to access research content.

In this blog article, we delve into the challenges researchers face in seeking academic research positions: finding suitable positions, logistical hurdles, and intense competition. Advancing a career poses challenges like understanding required skills and building collaboration networks. The Nature Masterclasses course offers solutions to overcome these obstacles.

Insights from experts on the changing nature of collaboration and how institutions are responding. Including the importance of collaboration, as well as some of the trends, and the challenges to successful collaborations.

This blog covers Springer Nature’s commitment to DEI in research and within the company itself. Highlighting a few contributions towards achieving the UN SDGs over the past year.

Former librarian, Andréa Gonçalves, shares her experiences, insights, and what initiatives are already in place to break down the structural barriers to advance and consolidate women’s careers as scientists.

Raising awareness about the SDGs and related research is one of the many things libraries can do in support of the goals. We look at how storytelling can empower researchers to communicate their research in new ways.

The 28th Panhellenic Academic Libraries Conference (PALC) gave Springer Nature and Hellenic Academic Libraries Link (HEAL-Link) the perfect opportunity to showcase the benefits of new open access Transformative Agreement for Greece.

A lively panel discussion at Charleston Conference 2022 considered how the role of libraries changed in the pandemic, whether those changes have remained, and how the pandemic has affected life and work on campus.

Partnering with the academic communities has Springer, and then Springer Nature, evolve into the world’s foremost academic publisher and a pioneer of open access publishing. We take a look at just a few of the highlights from the past 180 years

This year’s State of Open Data report provides insights into the motivations and challenges of researchers towards open data and highlights the need for institutions, libraries, publishers and funders to continue to support data sharing practices and principles.

We spoke to researchers who’ve published open access climate research. Exploring their views on open access and looking more closely at the power of transformative agreements to make open access more accessible

The new white paper about the Springer Nature/Jisc UK Transformative Agreement shows that not only researchers have a greater choice in how they publish and access content, but it also has significant advantages for institutions.

Why should librarians communicate and advocate the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? Librarian Gerald Beasley at Cornell University shares how he supports the SDGs and how other librarians can improve the way they support the SDGs.

Inspired by work highlighted in the 2021 Sustainable Business Report, we take a look at what’s meant by sustainability and some simple ways librarians can put sustainability on their library agenda

Why is it important to help support researchers together? Nicola Jones, Head of Publishing SDG programme, shares her thoughts on how she thinks librarians can support the SDGs

Digitization and ever-shrinking budgets caused librarians to rethink how libraries would need to be managed in the future. Then Covid-19 hit – and suddenly changes had to be made right there and then. Listen to librarian experiences from across the globe about how they are handling the changing role of the library.

How do we fix the user experience? At the end of January, the NISO invited a range of speakers to put forward ideas and case studies as part of their virtual conference, The User Experience: Just Fix It. Read about the latest developments

A panel of librarians and leadership experts discuss how leadership skills are vital for libraries to survive and flourish. Incl. practical advice and insights into the positive impact of effective leadership practices.

Readers and researchers with disabilities encounter a vast range of accessibility issues. The Charleston conference panel featured speakers who are seeking to understand and proactively address these challenges in a range of scholarly communications and publishing contexts including reading, authoring, and discovery. 

How can librarians improve the visibility of accessibility services online and ensure the accessibility of web content? These issues were addressed by an expert panel in a one-hour webinar presented by Springer Nature and Choice/ACRL.

Digital resources for libraries, such as digital databases and e-books, have gained significantly in popularity over the past decade. But how can librarians ensure the accessibility of these vital materials?

In 2021 Springer Nature became the first publisher to achieve the feat of publishing one million gold open access articles. Celebrating this significant milestone, looking back on the journey, and continued investments in an open research future.

Through 2020 we enhanced our remote access provisions to support researchers, students and faculty seamlessly from wherever they were working. While the long-term impacts of COVID-19 will continue to be evaluated for a long time to come, what have we learned from researcher access behaviors?

While some funder policies continue to place Green OA and Gold OA on an equal footing, the choice of OA route can have very different outcomes in the reach and impact of research. 

Strong leadership has never been more critical for libraries. But what does strong leadership mean in the library context? Download the white paper.

Open Access Week 2021 is here, bringing with it a focus on ensuring awareness and uptake of OA around the world. The theme for 2021 is: “It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity”.

Cyberattacks are on the rise and libraries are increasingly on the target list. Find out how to protect your library from an attack.

The concept of FAIR data has been instrumental in bringing open science and research data to the attention of the research community. What could the future look like?

In 2020, we started employing accessibility specialists to help support teams to improve the accessibility of our products

We are extremely proud to announce that the 2021 Nature Research Awards for Inspiring Women in Science which are now open for application!

Through its wider commitment to the principles and drive for open science, Springer Nature continues to enable a sustainable transition to Open Access (OA) for all authors regardless of discipline, location or funding

Despite the current climate, collaboratively we have all strengthened our partnerships and working practices to ensure that the content that was needed can be accessed when and where needed, and our connectivity - virtual or in-person - can thrive.

In collaboration with ResearchGate, we conducted a study, to find out to what extent article version matters to researchers.

SNSI has a broad interest in cybersecurity issues that is not confined to Sci-Hub piracy.  This was evident at their first official summit in 2020

Sebastian Bock, Product Manager at Springer Nature, talks to us about ResearchGate partnership what content will be shared and the positive impact on institutions.

The Customer Service team at Springer Nature supports you with any questions you might have about access, technical questions or general enquiries.

Find out more about our collaboration with the Materials Research Society in this interview with our Executive Editor Anita Lekhwani.

The reality of the worldwide virus threat has challenged academic libraries to respond with service delivery that encompasses attention to safety protocols and novel delivery methods. We have talked to universities worldwide, to find out how libraries in different regions are supporting students and researchers remotely.

How have libraries and staff been impacted? Listen our two librarian guest speakers discussing the impact of the pandemic on libraries.

Open research is changing the way that researchers communicate and collaborate and supports the pace and quality of discovery. This has led to the emergence of new and dynamic open research-driven workflows are emerging which are making it easier to find, access and reuse results.

Our Account Development Manager Catherine John spoke to Helen Adey about how the library at Nottingham Trent is adapting to distance learning during the pandemic

In 2019, Springer Nature partnered with The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) and its sister organisation UKB, to jointly explore and answer the question “Is open research facilitating progress on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)”? In this interview, we talk to Timon Oeflein on our Account Development team, about the background and findings of this partnership, and his role in facilitating it. 

Lately there have been a number of media reports highlighting a call for a radical rethink in climate change policies in the face of the current worldwide health crisis, and voices in the research community are proposing ways to rebuild our economy in a cleaner and more sustainable way. There is no denying that we are currently facing one of the biggest health crises in a long time. The question is; how will this impact our actions in the future?

Steven Skiena is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science and Founding Director of the Institute for AI-Driven Discovery and Innovation at Stony Brook University, The State University of New York. We spoke to Steven about his research, his published books and how the Augmented Age will affect our lives in the future. Read the interview here.

During January 2020 Springer Nature has been undergoing an auditing process in order to become COUNTER 5 compliant. The first iteration of COUNTER 5 reports, including the master report and standard views are already available. At the moment we provide data from September onwards, which will be extended to data being available from January 2019 by end of Q2 2020.

Springer Nature has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for an OA agreement with Projekt DEAL, a consortium of over 700 publically and privately funded academic institutions and research institutions in Germany. Looking back over the past twenty years, Springer and Nature both independently and together – have always been at the forefront of OA publishing and developments, as the needs of the research community have evolved.

Academic institutions are at the forefront of the sustainable development movement, producing research, that can provide the basis for new policies. UCL’s response to the Sustainable Development goals is called Grand Challenges (GC) and started in 2008 with the aim to address six grand challenges faced globally, using their influence and network both in the academic and industrial scene.

STEM research is often credited with finding solutions to many of the world’s most pressing and wide-reaching challenges, while Humanities & Social Sciences can be overlooked when it comes to the role it plays in supporting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and its contribution to the multidisciplinary research needed to solve some of the most complex global problems. 

At Springer Nature, we stay in contact with our customers in a number of ways: through regular contact with our sales and account development team; by attending conferences; our own Library Advisory Boards and Summits; and our recently launched Librarian Survey. Open Access plays a key role in many of these conversations and we are here to listen and collaborate with you to find solutions that work.

With global urban populations continuing to grow (UN DESA, 2018), many of the challenges associated with sustainability and human well-being will play out across the world’s towns and cities. Within Springer’s Earth Sciences, Geography, & Environment Department, is a dedicated Urban Studies & Urban Geography programme whose mission is to be at the forefront of research that both informs and helps to sustain the global community. 

The first institution and the first funding agency have begun to offer Research Data Support to their researchers. Researchers at University of Nevada, Las Vegas can now access Research Data Support, a service from Springer Nature that makes datasets easier to find, share and cite. Researchers funded by the Wellcome Trust can also use the service as part of a pilot project. 

SN SciGraph is the largest Linked Open Data aggregation platform in the scholarly domain. It makes data that is machine-readable, interoperable and re-usable freely available to the global community. Launched in February 2017, SN SciGraph was designed to help researchers, scholars, editors, librarians, funders, and developers overcome the challenge of extracting and merging large datasets from multiple repositories, and in multiple formats. Find out more.

Springer Nature's Grace Baynes, VP Data and New Product Development, discusses the differences between Open Access and Open Science and explains how Springer Nature helps libraries make their data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.

Inspired by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, Springer Nature’s Grand Challenges Programme launched in 2017 with an initial focus on five global challenges: climate change, global health, the food–energy–water nexus, a digitally transformed world and sustainable cities. We spoke to Mariette DiChristina, Executive Vice President of Editorial and Publishing for Nature Research Magazines and Editor-in-Chief of Scientific American, to get her insights into how the Grand Challenges Programme has grown over the past 18 months.

SN SciGraph is the Springer Nature linked data platform that collates information from across the research landscape, i.e. documents, people, & places of importance to the science & scholarly domain. SN SciGraph includes data on Springer Nature publications from almost 200 years, as well as funders, research projects, conferences, affiliations and institutions. The SN SciGraph Data Explorer is a website which allows users to explore the contents of SN SciGraph.

In line with Springer Nature’s expanding efforts to provide centralized resources across products for librarians, we are pleased to announce the new image library website is now live. This is a resource for finding and downloading product cover thumbnail images for books, book series, journals and issues. This image library is service is free.

In response to the challenges faced by researchers, funders and institutions, we're now offering research data services to help the research community manage and share data. The three new services are: Research Data Support, Training and Reporting.

Articles have been successfully shared by authors, subscribers and media outlets over 3.25 million times during the first year of SharedIt, Springer Nature’s free content sharing initiative.