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Springer Nature launches new book series that addresses major research pain points

Developed with RWTH Aachen University, Crosstracts speeds up publication and encourages cross-disciplinary working

Heidelberg | London, 21 February 2022 

Springer Nature and RWTH Aachen University’s Cluster of Excellence Internet of Production have created a new publishing format called Crosstracts to address two research challenges. It can often take a long time for research results to be published and so are not getting back to the lecture hall fast enough. Moreover, opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration are limited, connections across academic disciplines that are needed to help find solutions to global challenges are being lost.

Crosstracts will therefore speed up the time between research and publication and improve collaboration between researchers of different disciplines by:

  1. Publishing and disseminating research results as soon as they are finalised without having to wait for the whole book to be completed by harnessing Springer Nature’s Online First and Live Reference capability.
  2.  Having an in-built publishing requirement that at least one peer reviewer is selected from a different discipline. 

By embedding these processes directly into the publishing process, research findings will be able to be shared faster with collaboration across the disciplines becoming a regular occurrence. 

Henning Schoenenberger, Director Books Publishing Solutions, said:
“Our new concept is a great example of how collaboration can foster excellence and change for problem-driven, purpose-driven, and experience-driven user research. This will boost the creation of cross-discipline communities, achieve a positive impact on global challenges, and find societal recognition.” 

Melanie Buchsbaum, Managing Director of the Cluster of Excellence Internet of Production at RWTH Aachen, expressed: “We are pleased, we can innovatively rethink and implement the ideas of the new collaborative research not only for production technology itself, but also for the field of publishing.”

The output will be published as a book series, Interdisciplinary Excellence Accelerator Series (IDEAS). The first book of the series, to be published in 2022, will be Internet of Production: Fundamentals, Applications and Proceedings

The book series and collaboration originated from a Springer Nature Publishing Lab, a workshop format between the Springer Nature Publishing Solution’s team and selected academic partners. The one or two-day workshops focus on critical issues in the research knowledge transfer. They aim to help understand researchers’ needs and pain points and explore ideas for potential solutions.  

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About the Cluster of Excellence "Internet of Production" at RWTH Aachen:

The vision of the Cluster of Excellence Internet of Production (IoP) at RWTH Aachen is to enable a new level of crossdomain collaboration by providing semantically adequate and context-aware data from production, development and usage in real-time, on an adequate level of granularity.

About Springer Nature

For over 175 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

Contact

Felicitas Behrendt | Communications Manager | Felicitas.behrendt@springernature.com  | T +49 (0) 6221 487 9901