Springer Nature to expand content sharing to all journals

Springer Nature is to expand its nature.com content sharing initiative to its entire journals portfolio.

The initiative, which originally saw articles from 47 subscription journals made freely shareable between subscribers and non–subscribers around the world for personal, non-commercial use, as well to certain media outlets, was extended indefinitely in December following a year-long pilot which saw over 1.3 million additional article accesses.

Springer Nature will now offer the free, shareable links to view-only versions of the research papers not just to authors of Nature and the Nature research journals, but also to authors of all other Springer Nature-owned primary research journals, and ultimately to all primary research journals published by the company, with the agreement of their owners.

The range of media partners enabled to use the sharing facility, which already include the BBC, The Economist and The New York Times, is also to be extended.

Beyond these measures, Springer Nature said it is planning "additional steps to further extend sharing options which address the long-term needs of the research community".

Steven Inchcoombe, managing director of Springer Nature's Nature Research Group, said: "We are very pleased to be able to offer our authors and the wider research community a sharing solution that we think is easier, more dynamic and of greater value to them than static PDF downloads. As a publisher of large parts of the scientific record we take very seriously our responsibilities to our authors to protect their rights and to researchers to maximise their access to and use of the content we publish. We think this initiative strikes the right balance, given researchers' legitimate needs to share content as part of their collaborations and discussions and the increasing need of wider society to appreciate the results of recent research."

Inchcoombe said nature.com's year-long trial generated an average of over 200 extra users of each of its 6,000 research papers. "Now we are the first publisher to offer multi-site content sharing across more than 300,000 new research papers per annum, which we believe will result in wider sharing. We hope other publishers will join us in addressing this critical need of researchers and wider society."

The tools that enable the content sharing initiative, which offers hyperlinked citations, annotation capabilities and advanced article metrics, are provided by ReadCube.