30 million downloads of open access book chapters

Author: Penny Freedman

We’re proud to announce that there have now been more than 30 million chapter downloads across our open access (OA) books portfolio. That is for just over 500 OA books published by Springer Nature since we started tracking downloads from our official platform, Springer Nature Link, in 2013. We very recently published our 550th OA book.

By: Christina Emery, Marketing Manager, Outreach and Open Research

At Springer Nature our mission is to advance discovery and an important way in which we are doing this is via our commitment to open research and providing authors with the ability to publish open access. We offer open access book and chapter publishing options to researchers of all disciplines, and make this high quality peer-reviewed research as open as possible. It’s easy to share a direct link to various formats of your published research which means that your work is free to read and share across multiple devices without any barriers.

We also make it easy for our authors and readers to see the reach and impact of all our books, providing information on citations, online mentions, reviews and Mendeley readers through Bookmetrix. Just click on the metrics links for any individual eBook title on Springer Nature Link, our official platform.

Where do our readers come from?

In 2016, Springer Nature Link received 127 million unique visitors, making 285 million visits. The high volume of traffic on this platform increases the reach and readership of our open access books. Our open access books are also available through third party hosting platforms such as Amazon Kindle, Google Scholar, Apple Books, PubMed’s NCBI Bookshelf and funders’ own platforms. 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.

From our Springer Nature Link data, we can see that 44% of the downloads originated from 151 countries (other downloads were registered as anonymous users).

Why are we telling you this?

We know that metrics are important to our authors, as the data can help to demonstrate the impact of their research to funders, and also supports conversations with their institutions for career progression.

In our white paper The OA effect: How does open access affect the usage of scholarly books? we found that publishing an open access book with us can lead to 50% more citations, seven times more downloads, and ten times more online mentions.

Check out our new infographic

You can see further statistics on our new infographic, or visit our new usage statistics webpage for further details on downloads.

Want to submit an OA book, chapter or series proposal?

Check out our website and get in touch to find out more.

About our open access books portfolio

Since the launch of our OA books programme in 2012, we have published more than 550 OA books through SpringerOpen, Palgrave Macmillan, Apress and other imprints. We publish OA books across a wide range of subjects within the sciences, medicine, technology, the humanities and social sciences.

Access our OA books list and download any in a range of formats on Springer Nature Link.