Springer

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…

It’s three years now since I posted “The Inexorable Path of the Professional Society Publisher” and I thought it was time to revisit it. What’s always troubled me about that post is that it takes the view of the underdog — that is, of the small or mid-size professional society publisher — which is struggling…

Springer has become the latest publisher to offer ebook bundles to readers through Vancouver's BitLit. In an announcement made today (December 7), BitLit personnel tell The Bookseller that the new arrangement will add more than 100,000 titles to BitLit's "Shelfie" app. Some 1,200 publishers now offer some degree of bundling through BitLit, according to the…

NEW YORK—October 26, 2015—Springer Nature announces the launch of an interactive Related Content service on the SpringerLink platform. The service will make it faster and easier for researchers to discover relevant scientific content and is powered by UNSILO, a Semantic Discovery Engine that captures trending ideas and novel scientific concepts as they emerge. The new…

One form that the sharp competition in journals publishing takes is spirited auctions for the rights to the publications of professional societies. The head of a scientific society sometimes stumbles into this situation like a yokel coming into the big city for the first time. "They are really proposing to pay us that much? And with all these guarantees????" Yes, it is surprising to see what the commercial value of highly specialized research publications has become. The reason for this is that the largest publishers know very well what the prize is

Of all segments of publishing, the college textbook business has seemed for some time now to be the most likely to be disrupted.  There are many reasons for this, but the principal one is the spiraling cost of many texts, which has elicited a strong and angry reaction, including legislative action and the creation of rival materials that draw on many of the precepts of the Open Access movement (usually called OER for open educational resources).

Coursera, a leading massive open online course (MOOC) provider, today announced a pilot program with several of the top higher education publishers to expand the availability of their high-quality content and resources, to be facilitated byChegg, the student hub where students can access the tools and materials they need to succeed. 

Starting today, publishers Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education, Norton, Oxford University Press, SAGE, and Wiley will experiment with offering to Coursera students, at no cost for the duration of the course, versions of their e-textbooks, delivered via Chegg’s DRM-protected e-Reader. Coursera is also actively discussing pilot agreements and related alliances with Springer and additional publishers. The importance of rigorously developed pedagogical resources to learning outcomes has been well documented, and today’s announcement will link Coursera’s content to this enhanced learning process. While professors teaching Coursera's broad course offerings have until now been able to assign high-quality content freely available on the Web, they will now be able to work with top publishers to provide an even wider variety of carefully curated teaching and learning materials at no cost to the student.

Today, Springer announced that the Waseda University Library, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, Japan, acquired the English-language Springer Book Archives (SBA). Members of the university community now have online access to Springer content dating back to 1842 via SpringerLink (link.springer.com), Springer’s online platform. This is the first such purchase, not only at a Japanese university or research institute, but in all of Asia.

Heidelberg / New York / Melbourne, 4 April 2013 —By the end of 2013, Springer will offer online access to 100,000 eBooks with historic content through its Springer Book Archives (SBA), available anywhere, at any time, via SpringerLink (link.springer.com). As early adopters, Australasian universities were some of the first to offer access to this wealth of scientific content to students, faculty and researchers. Official launch events for the SBA will be held at the University of Melbourne on 5 April 2013, and at The Higher Education Technology Agenda Conference in Hobart, Australia on 8 April.

“The Springer Book Archives marks the culmination of years of planning, scanning and converting our historic titles to a digital format,” said Derk Haank, Springer’s CEO. “Our vision is to change the economics of the books business. We’re harnessing digital technologies to both deliver the best possible service to customers, and improve supply-chain efficiencies. And by offering tens of thousands of books available online for the first time, we are making ‘out of print’ a thing of the past for Springer titles.”

Springer and the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM) will partner to publish BCAM SpringerBriefs. The books will consist of concise summaries of cutting-edge research and practical applications in mathematics. These new SpringerBriefs will focus on the publication of content in a number of disciplines within mathematics. These fields include applied mathematics, finance, statistics and computer science. BCAM has appointed an international board to manage the editorial responsibility for the new books, made up by Enrique Zuazua in Bilbao, Spain; Irene Fonseca in Pittsburgh, USA; Juan J. Manfredi in Pittsburgh, USA; Emmanuel Trélat in Paris, France; and Xu Zhang in Chengdu, China. All books in the series will be available as eBooks on Springer’s online platform, SpringerLink (link.springer.com), and in print-on-demand (POD) format.