Publish OA, support the SDGs: Make your research impactful

Author: Jovial Toh

The work that you publish is meaningful beyond your direct academic community. It can contribute to the efforts to achieve sustainable development, especially when published openly and made available to all. Read on to explore the connection between open access (OA) and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and Springer Nature’s commitments to both. And most importantly, why you should publish your work OA.

When you publish your research OA, you make it available and accessible to anyone, anywhere. This means that your hard work can be used to support sustainable development through the SDGs. These 17 goals address the most pressing challenges of our time, covering topics relating to social development, environmental sustainability, economic growth, and more. Solving these challenges depends on open science.  

Open science and the SDGs: Research that can support sustainable development 

Open science ensures that all aspects of research – including data, code, protocols, etc. – are open to all. This is made possible through OA publishing. Researchers anywhere can access, understand, and build on work that is published OA. This availability means also that research outputs can more easily be translated into economic and social impact, for instance through the SDGs.

How is OA so meaningful to the SDGs? Because it is published OA, relevant research outputs can reach scientists, policymakers, and practitioners, as well as the general public. These substantially enhanced visibility and accessibility mean that findings and recommendations can be harnessed for actionable strategies on the SDGs.

Supporting the transition to fully OA, supporting the SDGs

Springer Nature is committed to supporting the SDGs and our greatest contribution is through the research we publish. Research is fundamental to the SDGs and their implementation, from identifying issues, through evaluating effective solutions, to monitoring interventions. We are creating new publishing routes for researchers to disseminate relevant insights related to the SDGs (in journals, books, and collections), and are amplifying the SDGs among our research audiences. Our SDG Programme is a home for SDG-related knowledge and facilitates the dissemination of impactful research.

While we publish research in all 17 SDGs, we believe that Springer Nature has a more direct role to play in several focus areas: SDG 4: Quality Education, SDG 5: Gender Equality, SDG10: Reduced Inequalities, SDG 13: Climate Change, and SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals. These focus areas reflect Springer Nature’s dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), as well as the interdisciplinary nature of the Goals and their solutions.

• SDG 4: Change Makers is part of Macmillan Education’s Advancing Futures programme. It aims to help teachers introduce sustainable development concepts into their classrooms, with students invited to create and share their visions for a fairer, more sustainable future.
• SDG 5: In 2023, Springer Nature India launched Her Research, Our Future, a flagship campaign to motivate the next generation of female scientists, which highlights and empowers female researchers in a series of outreach events and workshops. The inclusion of women in science and supporting women researchers is important in Springer Nature’s efforts towards gender equality.
• SDG 10: We created resources and guides on inclusive publishing to support editors on DEI. Another example is a six-week editor training programme developed by Communications Biology to introduce PhD students or postdoctoral fellows to editorial careers.
• SDG 13: For International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples 2023, Springer Nature supported the Global Indigenous Youth Summit on Climate Change by amplifying the voices of participants via a social media takeover. Nature published a special feature about how Indigenous young people and researchers can assist each other.
• SDG 17: Seeking new partnerships across our business and with other organisations, we collaborated on the Sustainable Development Knowledge Cooperative, hosted by Kudos, to identify, explain, showcase and publicise plain English summaries of research that can help achieve the SDGs. From its launch in September 2023 to the end of the year, the Cooperative received over 330,000 views.

OA plays a significant role in supporting the SDGs by promoting unrestricted access to information, facilitating knowledge sharing, and enhancing educational and research opportunities. The majority of our SDG-related articles are published OA, and are available to policy and decision makers as well as to the general public. Our commitment to the SDGs is intrinsically related to our support for the transition to full OA.

Publish your research OA for maximum impact

Publishing your research OA offers many benefits, not in the least the increased visibility and usage of the work. OA articles receive 1.6 times more citations, 6.0 times more downloads, and 4.9 times more Altmetric attention.

Publishing OA offers advantages to you as the author, and also to readers, who can access it and benefit from it. OA agreements make publishing your research OA easier: They remove the barriers to publishing OA and address the challenges it involves, such as finding funding for the article processing charges (APCs).

Springer Nature’s transformative agreements (TAs) support the transition to OA for hybrid journals. Researchers from over 3,700 institutions across six continents are now supported by a Springer Nature TA.

TAs enable participating institutions to combine journal subscription access along with OA publication costs. This means authors affiliated with participating institutions can publish OA with fees covered.

When you publish your work through a TA, you can get funds to publish OA regardless of your discipline or grant size. This is especially meaningful for research in humanities and social sciences (HSS), which is traditionally less well-funded, making publishing OA difficult. TAs are changing this, and already over 90% of HSS OA content in Springer Nature’s hybrid journals is now published via a TA.

As a researcher, choosing to publish OA means that your work enjoys greater visibility, and the enhanced accessibility means that it is more likely to have a societal impact and to support sustainable development. When you publish your work OA with Springer Nature, you can be sure that it will enjoy these advantages, and you can also feel comfortable that your publisher also supports and is committed to open science and the SDGs.

"Open access publishing has the potential to play a pivotal role in advancing SDG4: Quality Education by democratising access to knowledge, fostering collaboration, and driving innovation in education. In my own experience, I've observed that making my work open access has led to greater engagement and collaboration."

Dr. Antoni Perez-Navarro, Aggregate professor, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

"OA helps promote social justice by making sure that everyone has access to research, regardless of their personal or institutional funding situation. This seems to align with the mission of SDG16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions."

Dr Eric L. Piza, Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at Northeastern University 

Learn more about publishing OA with fees covered by an OA agreement.