Springer Nature marks new milestone with publication of its 2000th OA book
Milestone comes less than two years after publishing its 1000th OA book and demonstrates the rapid growth of OA book publishing over the last 18 months
London | Heidelberg, 26 October 2022
Springer Nature has today reached a milestone in its open access (OA) book portfolio, publishing its 2000th OA book, less than 2 years after the publication of its 1000th OA book. Springer Nature has pioneered OA book models since the launch of its dedicated OA books programme in 2012. In 2018, the OA books programme comprised 500 OA books with over 30 million chapter downloads. Only four years later, the total OA book output has quadrupled, and these books have received over 200million chapter downloads supporting authors and readers from around the globe. Their high usage, reuse and accessibility advances discovery worldwide.
The 2000th OA book, Past, Present and Future of a Habitable Earth: The Development Strategy of Earth Science 2021 to 2030, offers a roadmap of how to achieve harmony and sustainable development between human society and nature through the lens of cutting-edge research and recent advances in geoscience. It builds on Springer Nature’s collection of titles related to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), one of the largest collections of any publisher accounting for 25% of Springer Nature’s annual book output.
Niels Peter Thomas, Managing Director Books & President Greater China, Springer Nature, said: “Springer Nature has and remains committed to enabling a sustainable journey to OA for all researchers regardless of publishing format. We are delighted therefore to reach the milestone of 2000 OA books, and even fittingly for that text to be related to the SDG’s. Given the important role books place in scholarly communication, to be at the forefront of SDG OA book publishing, ensuring not only that we help more authors benefit from OA, but that the critical research they are publishing can be seen, read and accessed by the world over, tackling pertinent issues to our society, is something of which we remain incredibly proud.”
Research continues to show that publishing book titles OA leads to on average:
- 10 times more downloads than non OA books
- 2.4 times more citations on average compared to non-OA books
- a more geographically diverse readership, reaching 61% more countries than non-OA books
- Increased discoverability and accessibility, with SpringerLink, for example, receiving over 285 million visits each year from 127 million unique visitors
Springer Nature’s OA books cover a wide range of areas in science, technology, medicine (STM), and the humanities and social sciences (HSS) with a diverse array of book types including monographs, edited collections, reference works, and proceedings. The publisher continues to play an active role in the advancement of OA publishing for books through its deals and partnerships*, including its largest institutional OA book deal with the Max Planck Society and its Funding Support Service for community-driven initiatives**, to advance goals for open research driving forwards OA for the books market.
More information on Springer Nature’s OA book publishing can be found here, and the publisher’s wider commitment to open science can be found here and here.
Find our blogpost on celebrating our 2000th OA book here.
ENDS
*Our deals and partnerships in OA book publishing include UNESCO, LYRASIS, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Max Planck Society.
** Springer Nature’s Funding Support Service has, for example, supported initiatives like the OAPEN-led OA Books Toolkit that attempt to provide stakeholder-neutral information and standards around OA books.
For over 180 years Springer Nature has been advancing discovery by providing the best possible service to the whole research community. We help researchers uncover new ideas, make sure all the research we publish is significant, robust and stands up to objective scrutiny, that it reaches all relevant audiences in the best possible format, and can be discovered, accessed, used, re-used and shared. We support librarians and institutions with innovations in technology and data; and provide quality publishing support to societies.
As a research publisher, Springer Nature is home to trusted brands including Springer, Nature Portfolio, BMC, Palgrave Macmillan and Scientific American. For more information, please visit springernature.com and @SpringerNature
Felicitas Behrendt | Communications | Springer Nature
felicitas.behrendt@springernature.com
