What can publishing OA at Springer Nature do for you?

Author: Carrie Webster

VP Open Access

Early this month we announced our first report on our fully OA portfolio. As a company Springer Nature has long been an advocate for and active voice in the transition to open access - Springer was the first publisher to offer authors an OA choice on its subscription journals and BMC led the way as the first commercial OA publisher. We have a proud and longstanding heritage in publishing fully OA journals, with our journals and imprints playing a key role in developing industry standards and policies for open access and research.

Early this month we announced our first report on our fully OA portfolio. As a company Springer Nature has long been an advocate for and active voice in the transition to open access - Springer was the first publisher to offer authors an OA choice on its subscription journals and BMC led the way as the first commercial OA publisher. We have a proud and longstanding heritage in publishing fully OA journals, with our journals and imprints playing a key role in developing industry standards and policies for open access and research.

While previous research highlighted that publishing OA in hybrid titles can lead to 4x more downloads, 1.6x more citations and 2.5x altmetric scores, the data in this new report shows for the first time the higher impact that publishing in a fully OA journal can have for authors and the community. For authors publishing in Springer Nature’s fully OA journals as opposed to fully OA journals of other publishers:

• Their work is downloaded more with downloads increasing on average by 26% per annum (over the 2016-2021 period) - articles achieve on average 7000+ downloads per article, which can be up to 5x more than articles published in another publisher’s fully OA journals;
• They achieve higher citation rates in our fully OA journals - an average of 7.39 citations per article, the highest of all fully OA journals across OA publishers;
• They have the ability to publish in the broadest selection of fully OA journals of all publishers - our titles appear across more JCR categories (139) than any other fully OA journal publisher, with Springer Nature titles leading 6 of those categories, and 44% of our journals sitting in the top 25% for their field;

What was also great to see was the impact that publishing OA with us has had not only on the use and re-use of our author’s work and the benefits this has had, but the social and public impact that publishing in our fully OA titles has given our authors - open research in action. Two such authors, Dorothy Susan Chan and Dan O’Neill shared with us the impact that their work had had beyond the research sector - Dorothy’s changing pesticide regulation in Canada, and Dan’s changing perceptions around the medical safety of certain ‘fashionable’ dog breeds. 

 It also shows the value that open research brings to the communities it serves. As we saw during the early months and years of the COVID-19 pandemic, publishing in a fully OA journal enabled researchers and research to impact public perception, knowledge and development, and was pivotal in understanding contagion patterns which led to an effective vaccination programme. This collective value and impact that OA can, and is having, across all disciplines is why we continue to champion the transition towards fully OA.

We are incredibly proud of the heritage, experience and knowledge that our fully OA portfolio gives us in being able to support author and researchers needs, but as Steven Inchcoombe reflected on in a recent piece with the Times Higher Education - OA is not a one size fits all approach. 20+ years on from the ‘introduction’ of open access, we  have many new levers at our disposal to help drive the transition forwards (transformative agreements, transformative journals etc)- as it is important to remember that not every author, discipline, or country is at the same stage in their journey.  We need to ensure that we are supporting all authors, researchers, partners, with the tools, services and platforms they need, regardless of where they/ their country/ their discipline is on the road to open research. 

By 2024 we have committed to publishing 50% of our content OA, and with a portfolio of over 580 market leading fully OA journals and now the highest number of TJs, of any publisher, having met coAlition S’s targets earlier this year, we are making confident and strong strides towards this. But we will not be complacent - we will continue to draw on our heritage, knowledge and learnings from our partnerships and direct work with the communities we serve, to best inform our strategies going forwards.