There have been over 200 million chapter downloads across Springer Nature's open access books portfolio of 1,500+ books since we started tracking downloads from Springer Nature Link in 2013.
There are various points to consider, when discussing usage statistics:
• These books were published over a period of time
• Books vary in length depending on book type
• The average number of downloads can vary considerably by discipline.
Our official platform, Springer Nature Link, received 127 million unique visitors making 285 million visits in 2016. This high volume of traffic increases the reach and readership of our open access books, and the easy-to-use platform makes it is easier to access and share peer-reviewed research.
Our open access books are also available through third party hosting platforms such as:
• Amazon Kindle
• Google Scholar
• Apple Books
• PubMed’s NCBI Bookshelf
• the OAPEN Library
• funders’ own platforms
• plus 200+ other abstracting and indexing services.
We work together with these partners to ensure that our open access books are easily discoverable for wider dissemination of the high quality research that our authors publish. As our OA books are hosted by partners, it makes tracking usage difficult – however giving our authors the most impact for their research is worth this challenge.
Information on citations, Altmetric mentions and downloads is available on Springer Nature Link for any individual eBook title.
Read more about the benefits of publishing an open access book in our white papers The OA effect: How does open access affect the usage of scholarly books? and Diversifying readership through open access: A usage analysis for OA books.
• Springer Nature Link download statistics are COUNTER-compliant.
• Download statistics above cover January 2013 – December 2019, for 924 books hosted on the Springer Nature Link platform.
• These statistics include all formats available on Springer Nature Link: HTML views, PDF and EPUB downloads.
• Chapter download data for Palgrave Macmillan books is unavailable prior to 2016.
• Open access chapters in non-open access books have been excluded.
