With an unshakeable commitment to quality and openness, Springer Nature is turning the pages of research to advance discovery and help find solutions to society’s big challenges.
In this, our annual progress report for 2022, find out more about how we are delivering impact through transformative agreements, rigorous integrity practices, advanced technologies and a globally interconnected network.
Download our 2022 Annual Progress Report
(PDF, 7.6MB)95% of our customers agree we publish ‘rigorous research that can be trusted’
92 downloads from our platforms every second
1.25m+ open access articles published to date
Connecting global networks
The pursuit of knowledge is a lifelong journey. At Springer Nature, we’re with you every step of the way, with our trusted brands, our committed people and using advanced technologies to provide verified insights that are easy to find, understand, use and build on.
Through our vast global networks, we publish some of the world’s most influential journals, across the broadest range of disciplines. We’re the largest academic book publisher. We inspire learning in school classrooms and bring trusted insights into workplaces, including hospitals and doctors’ surgeries.
Education
Research
Health
Professional
Our role is to create global visibility for research, opening doors to discovery. We do this through our trusted brands and talented people, and by working in partnership with our communities across the research ecosystem.”
Frank Vrancken Peeters, Chief Executive Officer
We continue to deliver more visibility and more value for researchers and institutions, while investing to ensure that integrity is preserved. We’re using new technologies, including AI and machine learning, to support the entire research cycle from idea to impact.
Advancing trusted knowledge
The transition to open access (OA) is changing the research publishing business model. The same high levels of service; the same standards for acceptance; the same degree of integrity and trustworthiness – but now with more research impact through greater global reach, higher citations and increased media awareness. And the knowledge that everyone can benefit from the research.
To accelerate the shift to OA, we are leading the way with transformative agreements, which enable funders and institutions to cover OA publishing costs and subscription access for their affiliated researchers.
If it were not for the academic editors we would not be here.”
Ritu Dhand, Chief Scientific Officer
We work with more than 90,000 external academic editors, who act as champions for their subjects and custodians of the scientific record, building successful journals and books for their community. They dedicate their time and expertise to helping authors improve their manuscripts, and ensure the work commands the highest levels of quality and integrity.
In 2022, we extended our track record of processing more submissions, publishing more articles and books and increasing the shift to OA. We believe that transformative agreements are the best means of delivering a fast, cost-neutral and successful shift to OA globally and on a large scale.
Research published by Springer Nature is used, shared and built upon by others more and more each year, enabling the research community to collaborate to develop solutions to the world’s biggest challenges.
| 2018 | 2021 |
|---|---|
| 464 | 844 |
| 2018 | 2021 |
|---|---|
| 3.83 | 5.51 |
| 2018 | 2021 |
|---|---|
| 5.26 | 6.9 |
Springer Nature has the highest average citations per fully OA article in the industry 1: 6.9
+19% more than our closest pure OA competitor
+38% more than our closest mixed model competitor
1 Digital Science, Dimensions, fully OA articles published in 2021 with average citations in 2021 and 2022 per article.
We have always been curious by nature, asking questions, trying new things and rejoicing in the different. We’re building on our experience and using technology and AI tools, all of which we are deploying alongside human intervention and supervision to further help the research community.
Our platforms, products and solutions support the entire research cycle from idea to impact. Our platforms for open research supported 2.9 billion downloads in 2022 – 92 every second.
We use AI to help editors to quickly find the best peer reviewers from the global network of academics, and to help non-native English-speaking scientists to improve their science communication and reach new global audiences.
Technology embedded in the Springer Nature Article Processing Platform (Snapp) is helping us uphold the trustworthiness and quality of our published research, detecting plagiarism and machine-generated content.
Our financial performance enables us to maintain high levels of investment in technology to deliver better products, services, solutions, publishing processes and other digital capabilities. We invested more than €370 million in products and technology between 2020 and 2022.”
Ulrich Vest, Chief Financial Officer
Be part of progress
At Springer Nature, our smart, curious people want to make a difference to their communities and the world. With around 9,500 employees in 45 countries, we’re a truly global company, bound by an inspiring and inclusive culture. We strongly believe in doing things the right way – it’s why responsibility is one of our core values and permeates everything we do.
As we continue to open up the worlds of science, research, education and health, we want more talented people to join us. Working with us means being part of progress, and making an impact on society. We have four values that our people bring to life through our ways of working.
Trust each other and engage to build strong relationships – inviting and respecting different perspectives, working well together and recognising the contributions of all.
Activate change and accelerate our potential. Be agile and adaptable, open to new ideas, and embrace opportunities to develop and succeed.
Deliver on our promises and priorities and inspire through our actions. Be a role model for others – fair, respectful and true to ourselves.
Do the right thing for all our communities and champion diversity, equity and inclusion. Play your part in ensuring we act as a responsible business, driving sustainable progress and acknowledging everyone’s ideas and opinions.
We want our colleagues to keep learning throughout their careers. All employees have a recommended five days a year for training and development. In 2022, employee numbers grew by around 500 and we dedicated 60,000 hours to staff training and development. To help with the increased cost of living, we made significant additional payments to employees earning below a certain threshold in high-inflation countries.
It’s very clear to us that we can create better science if we better represent the communities that we serve.”
Jessica Gedamu, VP Global Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
To serve our customers and communities in a fairer way, we have introduced new frameworks to encourage editors and editorial boards to recruit more peer reviewers and editorial board members that are representative of the broader research communities they work with.
Addressing grand challenges
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a call to action to help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems, from poverty to climate change and inequality. The greatest contribution we make towards achieving the SDGs is through our published content.
Our goal is to be the publisher of choice for researchers whose work tackles global challenges, and we’re investing in our publications, people and technology to make that happen.
Macmillan Education’s Advancing Futures programme helps teachers introduce topics of global citizenship, sustainability, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) into classrooms. And it engages students with key elements of the SDGs, empowering them to work towards a fairer, more sustainable future.
This is really rewarding work – what we embed in our textbooks is taught in countless classrooms around the world.”
Mariela Gil, Macmillan Education
