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By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Thomas: ‘We Remain Incredibly Proud’
In an announcement from its London and Heidelberg offices, Holtzbrinck’s Springer Nature has announced clearing publication of its 2000th open-access book, less than two years after the publication of its 1,000th.
The announcement is another instance of the competition among major international publishers in the academic and scholarly space, many of them engaged in marking key benchmarks as they vie for the attention of researchers, libraries, scholarly societies, and others who are operating in the transition to open-access in the field.
In Springer Nature’s case, its 2000th open-access book is Past, Present and Future of a Habitable Earth: The Development Strategy of Earth Science 2021 to 2030.
It’s not bylined to a single author but to the Research Group on Development Strategy of Earth Science in China, from Science Press Beijing.
The publisher’s descriptive copy says that the book “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,” the copy goes on, “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 percent of Springer Nature’s annual book output.”
On reaching the new milestone for number of open-access titles published, Niels Peter Thomas is quoted. He’s the president and managing director of books for greater China at Springer Nature, and says, “Springer Nature has and remains committed to enabling a sustainable journey to open access for all researchers, regardless of publishing format.”
Thomas points out that it’s fitting that the 2,000th open-access title be related to the Sustainable Development Goals.
“Given the important role books place in scholarly communication,” he says, “to be at the forefront of SDG open-access book publishing—ensuring not only that we help more authors benefit from open access, 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.”
Spring Nature, without directly attribut9ing these statistics, Springer Nature adds that opening book tiles, on average:
- Get “10 times more downloads than non open-access books
- Draw “2.4 times more citations on average compared to non-open-access books
- Have “a more geographically diverse readership, reaching 61 percent more countries than non-open access books
- Show “increased discoverability and accessibility, with SpringerLink, for example, receiving more than 285 million visits each year from 127 million unique visitors
More from Publishing Perspectives on Springer Nature is here, more on open access is here, and more on scholarly and academic publishing is here.
More from us on the still-ongoing coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on international book publishing is here.