Springer Nature seeks early adopter institutions and funders to shape new research data services
London, 30 January 2018
New support services to help the research community manage and share data are being rolled out by Springer Nature. Following a successful pilot offering data deposition support to Springer Nature authors, announced in April 2017 and extended to all researchers in January 2018, a wider range of research data services are now being introduced for institutions and funders.
The recent report from Digital Science, State of Open Data 2017, shows that while the proportion of researchers sharing their data has grown, efforts to archive, publish and share data continue to be hampered by time constraints and a lack of knowledge around data standards, repository options, and funder and institutional requirements.
Developed in response to these challenges, Springer Nature’s Research Data Support services for institutions and funders aim to overcome many of these problems.
To support data deposit into repositories, Research Data Editors will curate and enhance metadata to improve its discoverability and encourage reuse in accordance with the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data principles. Editors will also help authors draft summaries and data availability statements to improve human readability and data linking and citation. Initially made available on Figshare, the service can be used for any scholarly research data (including code, videos, images, text, raw and processed data) whether or not they are associated with a publication.
Research Data Editors and in-house data policy experts will also offer webinars, workshops and “train-the-trainer” resources on policy and best practice in data management, along with hands-on data curation workshops.
Working with institutions and funders, Springer Nature also aims to develop data availability statement reporting to support policy compliance and track research outputs and impact.
Grace Baynes, Data & New Product Development Director in Springer Nature’s Open Research Group said: “These services have been created in direct response to what funders and institutions are telling us they are worried about, including lack of data expertise in the research community. Funders and institutions also want to encourage best practice, ensure compliance with data sharing policies, and help bring about a change in culture – where data sharing and good data management is the norm. ”
Tim Britton, Managing Director of Open Research at Springer Nature said: “We’re delighted to introduce these new services for institutions and funders to support good practice in research data management and data sharing. We believe that in facilitating open data we can support the community as it takes advantage of the huge opportunities which open science presents. We’re very excited to be taking this step in our journey from open access to open research and beyond.”
To find out more or enquire about pricing, please visit our website for more information on Research Data Support for researchers and additional services available for institutions.
More information can also be found in our Research Data Community portal, which features blog posts from experts, discussion threads and research data resources.
For more information, contact:
Jenny Gimpel
Director of Communications, Open Research
Springer Nature
T: +44 (0)20 7843 4837
M: +44(0)7884 547 505
E: jenny.gimpel@springernature.com
Springer Nature advances discovery by publishing robust and insightful research, supporting the development of new areas of knowledge, making ideas and information accessible around the world, and leading the way on open access. Key to this is our ability to provide the best possible service to the whole research community: helping authors to share their discoveries; enabling researchers to find, access and understand the work of others; supporting librarians and institutions with innovations in technology and data; and providing quality publishing support to societies.
As a research publisher, Springer Nature is home to trusted brands including Springer, Nature Research, BioMed Central, Palgrave Macmillan and Scientific American. For more information, please visit springernature.com and @SpringerNature.
