Extension of partnership with Code Ocean will help Springer Nature authors to better share their code and data
By integrating sharing and tracking of code and data, this multi-year agreement will also make code peer review easier for editors and reviewers, and improve the author experience
London | New York | Heidelberg, 16 November 2022
Following a successful trial, Springer Nature is extending its partnership with Code Ocean to better integrate code deposition and peer review with the manuscript submission process. Authors from select Nature portfolio titles will now have the option to share their code and data using the code ocean platform when they submit to one of the participating journals, and receive expert support to do so.
Speaking on the partnership, Erika Pastrana, Editorial Director, Health and Applied Sciences, Springer Nature said: “Code is a key component of research and increasingly computational approaches are utilised or developed as part of a research project. At SN, we want to support authors openly sharing and publishing the key research objects that support the manuscript, such as code, data and protocols. The sharing of code and data improves reproducibility , reduces duplication of effort, supports better transparency and enables faster advancement of research . Moreover, we believe that the code (and other key research objects) should be peer reviewed alongside the manuscript. For this reason, we have looked to deploy suitable technological capabilities to support authors and reviewers to comply with our open science policies.
“By extending this partnership, we are building on the success we have seen in previous pilots, by now enabling a streamlined process for authors, editors and reviewers to easily share and review code - something which is fundamental to open science.”
Code deposition and peer review via Code Ocean will initially be available to authors submitting to Nature Computational Science and Nature Machine Intelligence that have developed new code that is central to their work. It also allows authors that have other means of sharing code, for example via GitHub or Zenodo to provide those details directly via the journal submission platform. Using this integration, editors will be able to track the sharing of code directly on the submission platform, and where appropriate will automatically see the relevant information in instructions to reviewers to peer review the code.
Simon Adair, CEO and Co-Founder, Code Ocean further added: “Our ongoing partnership with Springer Nature is a testament to our shared goals in tackling the difficulties found in reusing code and data, as well as the difficulties in proving reproducibility, even of published findings. By allowing for the sharing of code and data at the point of submission these integrations serve to increase the pace of science and improve researcher workflow - bringing benefits across the research cycle.”
Springer Nature has long been committed to advancing reproducibility and open research practices across its journals. This includes steps taken to improve reproducibility of published research by the Nature portfolio journals, the introduction of Springer Nature Data policies and continued support for protocol sharing, including through our open repository for community-contributed protocols, Protocol Exchange.
Further information on Springer Nature’s commitments to driving open science principles, solutions and policies to enable openness and transparency in research can be seen in the State of Open Data Report, MDAR framework, their open science policies and the publisher’s ongoing drive of the FAIR data principles.
