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.

Questions about open data?

Please contact us.

How can we support you?

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

We can help your institution increase data sharing and meet funder data sharing requirements. 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.

Research Data helpdesk

Get free advice from our expert team on how and where to share your research data, according to your specific research community.

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.

We support a number of education and best practice initiatives. These include: Research Symbiont Awards; International Digital Curation Conference; Love Data Week; Researcher to Reader; Research Data Alliance; CODATA conference.
Our free Better Science Through Better Data conference and Better Research Through Better Data series support researchers in understanding the benefits, challenges and practicalities of managing and publishing research data.

Maria Hodges, Executive Editor, BMC

Graham Smith, Research Data Year group representative

Graham Smith, Working group co-chair (FAIRsharing Registry: Connecting data policies, standards and databases RDA working group)

Chris Graf, Stakeholder Advisor

Sowmya Swaminathan, Executive Advisor

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.