Peer Review Week 2017: Transparency in Review, and other innovations

By Steven Inchcoombe, Chief Publishing Officer, Springer Nature At Springer Nature every week is Peer Review Week. Each week our dedicated in-house editorial staff spend thousands of hours co-ordinating the process of peer review, to ensure and improve the quality of the scientific literature we publish and in doing so, advance discovery. We support our Editors in Chief, Editorial Board Members, Section Editors, peer reviewers and authors by providing guidance and systems to enable them to improve manuscripts. Furthermore, we’re trialling innovative new practices through small-scale pilots, while also exploring grander ideas such as the potential role of Artificial Intelligence. … Read more…

Paying it forward with Peer Review

As part of the Peer Review Week 2017 we speak to Senior Editor Annett Buettner about the Filter of Hope initiative, which donates a water filter for each peer review completed in the Springer journal Environmental Earth Sciences. Q) How did you come up with this idea? It was over a beer, sometime in 2014, where some colleagues quite informally talked about peer reviewers and the fact that we needed to reward them in some way for the work that they do. We wanted an easy-to-implement, ethical and financially feasible solution and got thinking after that evening. Finally it was … Read more…

Transparency in Peer Review: Conference Proceedings

The Peer Review Week 2017 celebrates the importance of peer review in maintaining the quality and accuracy of science. Today we shed light on the Peer Review process in Conference Proceedings. Written by Aliaksandr Birukou Conference Proceedings can be a great format for publishing important and valuable research and communicating new results much faster than journals. Did you know that conference proceedings are not just a simple compilation of conference papers but also go through rigorous, often-times a stricter peer review process? Let’s look at an example. The proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2017, … Read more…

The story of Springer’s first Open Access Book

Did you know that it has been five years since Springer launched an open access books programme? To commemorate this landmark we feature the story of our first Open Access book and the benefits of publishing Open Access.   Written by Christina Emery  A year before the official launch of its OA books programme in August 2012, Springer published its first OA book: Future Internet Assembly 2011: Achievements and Technological Promises (Editors: Domingue, J., Galis, A., Gavras, A., Zahariadis, T., Lambert, D., Cleary, F., Daras, P., Krco, S., Müller, H., Li, M.-S., Schaffers, H., Lotz, V., Alvarez, F., Stiller, B., … Read more…

5 Tips to use LinkedIn in promoting your research

The Source has launched a new series which details how authors can better promote their work (and themselves!). As part of this series, we will be featuring tips and tricks to author self-promotion and advancing discovery of their work. Today we look at one of the most prominent professional networking sites, LinkedIn.  Are you under the impression that LinkedIn is all about making business to business connections? That it’s a gold mine for job seekers and head hunters, but a platform that isn’t quite relevant to you as a cholar? Think again! Since its beginning in 2002, LinkedIn has become a valuable … Read more…

InChI: Advancing Discovery in Chemistry

We’re excited to have the opportunity to spotlight the International Chemical Identifer (InChI), a project of IUPAC and the InChI Trust. This descriptor aims to make naming conventions for chemical compounds and reactions more streamlined. Here, Josef Eiblmaier, Valentina Eigner-Pitto, Hans Kraut from InfoChem and Samuel Winthrop, an expert in the field, explain how InChI is helping researchers standardize results and how Springer Nature chemical content will be more readily available to the public. Written by Josef Eiblmaier, Valentina Eigner-Pitto, Hans Kraut, and Samuel Winthrop What’s in a name? Among chemical substances – quite a lot. As researchers continue to elucidate the … Read more…

Behind the Scenes at Springer Nature: Marketing

What does it take to get your journal article from submission to publication? How does your book go from a manuscript to a title available at your university library? When your journal partners with Springer Nature for distribution, what steps are taking place to ensure all goes smoothly? We’re answering these questions and more in our new series “Behind the Scenes at Springer Nature.” Learn about the work being done across the company by our dedicated employees from around the world. Today we’re chatting with Divya Laul from our Springer marketing team. What is your position at Springer? I work as … Read more…

Bookmetrix summer update

Hello from steaming hot Heidelberg! This year, which marks Springer’s 175th anniversary, we are experiencing a memorably hot summer. And while writing this blog post, I’m hoping that our office cafeteria serves iced coffee in the afternoon… With this in mind I chose the following book title Cool Math for Hot Music and will use it as an example to show you the latest enhancements to our Bookmetrix platform. Thanks to a strong team of new developers who quickly grasped both the importance and the potential of Bookmetrix, new services are being prototyped and released at a high pace. So … Read more…

How do researchers use social media and scholarly collaboration networks (SCNs)?

Written by: Tina Harseim, Head of Social Media, Springer Nature Gregory Goodey, Research Analyst, Springer Nature Social media is not only a way for authors and publishers to disseminate research findings, it’s also increasingly being used by researchers to discover and read scientific content. To better understand how social media and scholarly collaboration networks (SCNs) are used within academia to support research activity, Springer Nature conducted a survey in February. This was in follow up to a Nature survey carried out in 2014. (The original survey can be found here: Online collaboration: Scientists and the social network) Over 3,000 researchers … Read more…

Societies and the Springer Nature experience

We asked Sue Duncan, Technical Editorial Advisor for Hydrogeology Journal, the official journal of the International Association of Hydrogeologists (IAH), what it’s like to work with Springer at the partner level.  Tell us about IAH. What are your mission and values? IAH was founded in 1956 and celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2016. Our mission is to further the understanding, wise use and protection of groundwater resources, primarily to ensure aquifer and ecological sustainability and thus long-term access to safe drinking water. Now with around 4,100 members in over 130 countries, our society has emerged as the leading organisation specialising in … Read more…