A good home for almost every paper

Author: Scott Epstein

There’s a reason Springer Nature publishes so many journals, even within disciplines—and that reason is that one size does not fit all. So to best serve authors, we’ve worked to provide the right venues for as many researchers as we possibly can.

Having a variety of journals, even in individual disciplines, means we can offer options and alternatives to authors looking for the right home for their work. To help do that, we’ve built an editorial Transfer Desk so that if one journal rejects a submission for reasons other than lack of scholarly soundness, we can help the authors get that paper resubmitted and published in another Springer Nature journal with a minimum of wasted time and lost effort. 

What this could mean for scholarly authors is that giving thought to a journal’s publisher—and that publisher’s broader portfolio in the author’s discipline—could help streamline the submission process. For example, at Springer Nature, even while most of our journals have independent Editors and Editorial Boards made up of active researchers*, all our journals share the same underlying DNA. They all have the same high-quality production, hosting, indexing, search optimization, archiving and services. Which means that if you’ve selected a Springer Nature journal as your first choice, you should know that all other Springer Nature journals feature the same quality on all those services.

Of course, everyone would love for their first-choice journal to accept their submission on the first try. But if you’re thinking of a Springer Nature journal for your article, if you consider other Springer Nature journals as your second or third choices, the Transfer Desk can help you keep lost time and effort to a minimum. And because we have so many options, there are probably journals similar to any other “next choice” venue you may have considered from other publishers. 

Plus, we have Editorial Submission Advisors (ESAs) working at our Transfer Desk. ESAs personally review submissions, and they make recommendations based on their human reading of the manuscript, combined with their own experience as researchers in the field and their knowledge of Springer Nature’s journal portfolio. They collaborate with authors to find good transfer options for every submission they review. You can read our first interview with the Louisa Flintoft, the head of the Transfer Desk; and watch for an interview with Stella Georgiadou, Senior Submission Editor, coming soon. And we will soon be launching a podcast series featuring the ESAs, talking about some of the more notable papers for which they’ve found the right homes. 

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*Some Springer Nature journals have in-house editorial staff; for example, the Nature-titled journals, as well as the BMC Series and Flagship journals, and the SN journals like SN Applied Sciences. But the vast majority of Springer Nature journals have Editors and Boards composed of active researchers in the field.