Taylor & Francis launches its most advanced and accessible eReader

January 22, 2025

Taylor & Francis has announced the introduction of an innovative eReader for its eBooks platform, providing a seamless and enhanced experience for all readers. Accessibility was a key priority for the development, ensuring the eReader meets the reading requirements of all users.

The Taylor & Francis eBooks platform previously offered two eReader options, for basic or advanced features. Responding to feedback, the new eReader combines into one application the full range of features, including personalization, powerful search and offline access, as well as enhancements to support students and researchers.

Accessible and inclusive reading experience

Developed in conjunction with Taylor & Francis’ accessibility team, the new eReader is part of a series of updates following the requirements of the European Accessibility Act. This includes support for ePub3, the most accessible eBook format, which is now available for more than 175,000 Taylor & Francis books.

The eReader has ‘read aloud’ functionality, using text-to-speech technology, which enables users to have the content read to them in multiple languages. Readers can also adjust font sizes and styles according to their preferences.

Stacy Scott, Head of Accessibility at Taylor & Francis, said: “A key element of our industry-leading accessibility program is the creation of products and services that are ‘born accessible’. The development team have kept this as a priority throughout the process and we’re delighted that the result is an eReader which is as inclusive as possible.”

State-of-the-art features

Arpit Goel, Senior Product Manager at Taylor & Francis, said, “The Taylor & Francis eBooks platform is used by many different groups of people, from general readers to students and researchers. We wanted to make sure that the new eReader enables everyone to get the most out of the books we publish. We also know that readers engage with eBooks across multiple devices and when they’re on the move, so the eReader has been designed to be incredibly flexible.”

Users of all kinds will benefit from the eReader’s optimized reading experience, with a responsive design that adapts to desktops, tablets and mobile devices. Users can also download content in ePub or PDF format, which will enable them to continue reading when they are offline.

The eReader provides a range of customization options. Readers can bookmark pages for quick access to content they want to return to and they can annotate the text with their personal notes and highlights, all of which are easily managed in one central location.

For students and researchers, the eReader’s advanced search tool enables them to locate specific terms, phrases, or concepts throughout the entire text, streamlining the process of finding relevant information. It also integrates with reference management software like EndNote and RefWorks, allowing researchers to handle bibliographic data and export citations seamlessly.

The eReader is available now for all users of the Taylor & Francis eBooks website on book and chapter pages.

Society for Scholarly Publishing Mentorship Program Call for Applications Open

January 22, 2025

Applications are open for the next cohort of the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s (SSP) popular, ongoing Mentorship Program! Our Career Development Committee seeks potential mentors and mentees to connect for professional development, information exchange, networking, personal growth, and career advancement.

Mentorship is valuable for professionals at all career levels. It provides opportunities for mentors and mentees to develop new relationships, share experiences, and learn from others outside their organizations. The next cohort will run from February through August. Applications for mentees and mentors are accepted through January 31, 2025. Participants will be notified in mid-February.

The SSP Mentorship Program is open to SSP members only. (You can join online!) Selected participants are matched with mentors or mentees by the Career Development Committee based on complementary goals and skill sets. They are expected to meet at least once monthly for six months.

SSP is deeply committed to fostering a community that supports and benefits from the talents of scholarly publishers from a wide range of backgrounds. We believe that our community must center diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, and we strongly encourage people from traditionally marginalized groups to apply as mentors or mentees.

Since 2017, SSP’s Mentorship Program has helped scholarly publishing professionals identify potential career paths by expanding their knowledge of career options within the industry and providing learning experiences outside the workplace.

Mentors benefit by giving back to the field, enjoying the satisfaction and impact of sharing their knowledge and experience, expanding their networks, and learning new things from their mentees. Mentees benefit from new perspectives on their work, expanding their networks, gaining a sounding board for ideas and projects, and increasing their self-worth.

We thank the American Geophysical Union and ITHAKA for the generous sponsorship of our Mentorship Program. Organizations interested in sponsorship opportunities should contact partnerships@sspnet.org.

The Generations Fund makes the Mentorship Program possible. Generous donations from members and industry endow the Generations Fund, allowing SSP to continue this program perpetually. Click here to learn more or make a gift to help us reach our $500,000 goal.

Visit SSP’s Mentorship page for more information about program details, eligibility requirements, and how to apply before January 31!

IEEE and CAPES Sign Three-Year Transformative Agreement to Accelerate Open Access Publishing in Brazil

January 22, 2025

IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, announced today that it has reached an unlimited read and publish open access agreement with the Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior (CAPES), a federal agency within the Brazilian Ministry of Education, to support researchers who choose to publish via open access.

Under this new three-year agreement, all researchers from the participating 163 Brazilian institutions are now able to publish open access articles in over 200 leading peer-reviewed journals and magazines published by IEEE, making articles that are accepted for publication instantly available and free to read. This program supports CAPES’ mission to make their authors’ publications open to the world. Under the terms of the agreement, the costs of both access to subscription content and the article processing charges (APCs) required to publish open access are included in the license fees paid by consortium members, making the open access publishing easier and more convenient for authors.

Participating members of CAPES will have:

● Open access publishing rights in all of IEEE’s hybrid journals and fully open access journals, making articles accepted for publication instantly available and free to read by the general public.

● Read access rights to peer-reviewed journals, papers from approximately 2,000 annual technology-focused conferences, and IEEE standards available in the IEEE Xplore® Digital Library. IEEE Xplore includes more than six million documents and adds over 250,000 new documents each year.

“CAPES and the Portal de Periódicos (Journals Portal) are working hard to offer Brazilian researchers the opportunity to publish in renowned journals at no cost,” stated Andréa Vieira, General Coordinator of the Periodical Portal, CAPES. “In this sense, the agreement between CAPES and IEEE will favor the advancement of open access and the expansion of scientific production in Brazil at no cost to researchers at eligible Brazilian institutions. We believe in this successful partnership!”

“IEEE is enthusiastic about this agreement with the CAPES’ research community, which will provide Brazilian scholars with a wide array of open access publishing options across our highly cited portfolio of journals,” said Karen Hawkins, Chief Marketing Officer, IEEE. “The aim of this transformative agreement is to streamline open access publication for Brazilian authors, thereby reinforcing IEEE’s commitment to share the work of leading researchers with the global research community to further scientific and engineering progress. The agreement enhances our existing collaborations and will ensure that researchers and students maintain access to subscription content, while offering funding support for open access publishing across our extensive and impactful journal collection.

IEEE has expanded its open access program and launched many new fully open access titles in fields such as privacy, telecommunications, biomedical engineering, machine learning, nanotechnology, and more. To learn more about the IEEE open access options for authors and institutions or to view a list of over 500 institutions which have open access agreements with IEEE, please visit open.ieee.org.

MIT Press’s Direct to Open reaches annual funding goal for 2025, opens access to 80 new monographs

January 22, 2025

Support for Direct to Open in 2025 includes two new three-year, all-consortium commitments from the Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC) and the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA)

The MIT Press is pleased to announce that Direct to Open (D2O) has reached its full funding goal for 2025 and will open access to 80 new monographs and edited book collections in the spring and fall publishing seasons.

“It has been one of the greatest privileges of my career to contribute to this program and demonstrate that our academic community can unite to publish high-quality open access monographs at scale,” said Amy Harris, Senior Manager of Library Relations and Sales at the MIT Press. “We are deeply grateful to all of the consortia that have partnered with us and to the hundreds of libraries that have invested in this program. Together, we are expanding the public knowledge commons in ways that benefit scholars, the academy, and readers around the world.”

Among the highlights from the MIT Press’s fourth D2O funding cycle is a new three-year, consortium-wide commitment from the Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC) and a renewed three-year commitment from the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA). These long-term partnerships will play a pivotal role in supporting the Press’s open access efforts for years to come.

“The Florida Virtual Campus is honored to participate in D2O in order to provide this collection of high-quality scholarship to more than 1.2 million students and faculty at the 28 state colleges and 12 state universities of Florida,” said Elijah Scott, Executive Director of Library Services for the Florida Virtual Campus. “The D2O program allows FLVC to make this research collection available to our member libraries while concurrently fostering the larger global aspiration of sustainable and equitable access to information.”

“The Libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance are committed to supporting the creation of open access content,” added Kate McCready, Program Director for Open Publishing at the Big Ten Academic Alliance Library. “We’re thrilled that our participation in D2O contributes to the opening of this collection, as well as championing the exploration of new models for opening scholarly monographs.”

In 2025, hundreds of libraries renewed their support thanks to the wonderful teams at consortia around the world, including the Council of Australasian University Librarians, the CBB Library Consortium, the California Digital Library, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, CRL/NERL, the Greater Western Library Alliance, Jisc, Lyrasis, MOBIUS, PALCI, SCELC, and the Tri-College Library Consortium.

Launched in 2021, D2O is an innovative sustainable framework for open access monographs that shifts publishing from a solely market-based, purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single eBooks, to a collaborative, library-supported open access model.

Many other models offer open access opportunities on a title-by-title basis or within specific disciplines. D2O’s particular advantage is that it enables a press to provide open access to its entire list of scholarly books at scale, embargo-free, during each funding cycle. Thanks to D2O, all MIT Press monograph authors have the opportunity for their work to be published open access with equal support to traditionally underserved and underfunded disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.

The MIT Press will now turn its attention to its fifth funding cycle and invites libraries and library consortia to participate. For details, please visit our website or contact our Library Relations team at mitp-library-relations@mit.edu.

Key statistics

321 – number of open access books funded through D2O to date
659,453 – total # of times published D2O books have been read on the MIT Press platform
12.74% / 54.78% / 32.48% – % of humanities/social sciences/STEM in D2O

Spring 2025 Direct to Open books

Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a Way of Life by Matthew Wisnioski

Ascending Republic: The Ballooning Revival in Nineteenth-Century France by Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira

Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies by Eliot Bates and Samantha Bennett

License to Spill: Where Dry Devices Meet Liquid Lives by Rachel Plotnick

Ecologies of Artistic Practice: Rethinking Cultural Economies through Art and Technology by Ashley Lee Wong

Principles of Biological Autonomy, a new annotated edition by Francisco J. Varela

Laws of Human Behavior: Steps Toward Hard Science by Donald Pfaff and Sandra Sherman

Proxistant Vision: Motion, Navigation, Scale by Synne Tollerud Bull and Dragan Miletic

The Human Edge: Analogy and the Roots of Creative Intelligence by Keith J. Holyoak

The Invisible Hand: Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Human Hand Function by Matthew R. Longo

How That Robot Made Me Feel edited by Ericka Johnson

Differential Privacy by Simson L. Garfinkel

Heartbeat Art by Claudia Arozqueta

A Regional Contemporary: Art Exhibitions, Popular Culture, Asia by C. J. W.-L. Wee

A Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life by Kathryn Nave

The Nuclear-Water Nexus by Per Högselius and Siegfried Evens

Good Will Corrupting: Social Norms and the Trouble of Intervention by Adam Moe Fejerskov

At the Crossroads of Psychology and Anthropology: In Conversation with Jerome Bruner edited by Bradd Shore

Fragilities: Essays on the Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics of Maintenance and Repair edited by Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Jérôme Denis and David Pontille

Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch by Mia Consalvo, Marc Lajeunesse and Andrei Zanescu

From the Laboratory to the Moon: The Quiet Genius of George R. Carruthers by David H. DeVorkin

Triangles and Tribulations: Translations, Betrayals, and the Making of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory by Clay Spinuzzi

Revolutionary Engineers: Learning, Politics, and Activism at Aryamehr University of Technology by Sepehr Vakil, Mahdi Ganjavi and Mina Khanlarzadeh

Let Geography Die: Chasing Derwent’s Ghost at Harvard by Alison Mountz and Kira Williams

Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice by Remi Kalir

Unboxing Japanese Videogames: A Metadata-Based Approach to the Production and Distribution of Spatial Instability by Martin Roth

Trans Technologies by Oliver L. Haimson

Measures and Meanings of Spatial Capital: Contributions to a Theory of Land by Lars Marcus

Modern Chinese Foodways edited by Jia-Chen Fu, Michelle T. King and Jakob A. Klein

Spheres of Injustice: The Ethical Promise of Minority Presence by Bruno Perreau

Play It Again, Sam: Repetition in the Arts by Samuel Jay Keyser

Interception: State Surveillance from Postal Systems to Global Networks by Bernard Keenan

Deflating Mental Representation by Frances Egan

The Theory of Deliberative Wisdom by Eric Racine

The World According to Military Targeting by Erik Reichborn-Kjennerud

Epistemic Ecology by Catherine Z. Elgin

AI Fairness: Designing Equal Opportunity Algorithms by Derek Leben

The Smoke and the Spoils: Anti-Environmentalism and Class Struggle in the United States by John Hultgren

The Ecology Politic: Power, Law, and Earth in the Anthropocene by Anthony Burke and Stefanie Fishel

ResearchGate and BMJ Group expand Journal Home partnership to cover wider group of journals and activate Open Access Agreement Update

January 22, 2025

ResearchGate, the professional network for researchers, and BMJ Group, a global leader in healthcare knowledge provision and a pioneer in open access (OA), have announced a further expansion to their Journal Home partnership. This expansion will increase the number of the Group’s open access journals active through Journal Home, and incorporate Journal Home’s pioneering new Open Access Agreement Upgrade (OAAU).

The expanded agreement covers 15 open access journals across a broad spectrum of medical disciplines. Participating journals benefit from:
Seamless content syndication for all version-of-record content, reaching ResearchGate 25 million+ active researcher members.
Dedicated journal profiles showcasing key information and content from each title, increasing brand visibility within the network, and driving global readership and engagement with potential authors across the global medical research community.
Authors additionally benefit from enhanced services, including automatic sharing of their articles and insights on who is engaging with their work.

In addition, BMJ Group are among the growing list of partners activating the innovative Open Access Agreement Upgrade for Journal Home, a powerful new feature facilitating highly relevant and timely open publishing opportunities. The OAAU presents a unique opportunity to reach and inform relevant researchers about their eligibility to receive funding support for open access.

With insights based on publishing history and areas of research, BMJ Group can now deliver targeted publishing opportunities that are specific and relevant to individual researchers. Recent adopters of the OAAU are already seeing strong results, continuously reaching researchers in more than 90% of the institutions covered by their agreements within the first six months.
With the increased number of journals included in Journal Home and the OAAU activated, the Group will also unlock a unique understanding of their researcher communities: sophisticated reporting and analytics measure the volume and effectiveness of engagement through Journal Home at each stage of the publishing journey — from readership all the way through to authorship.

“As a global healthcare knowledge provider, we continue to pursue innovation in our services, and we believe Journal Home and the Open Access Agreement Upgrade are essential tools to continue to effectively engage with our audience globally,” said Claire Rawlinson, Director of Growth Strategy, BMJ Group.

“Journal Home has already provided BMJ Group with an immensely powerful platform to expand their global reach and influence to medical researchers,” said Sören Hofmayer, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at ResearchGate. “Through the addition of OAAU, partners are seeing meaningful uptake of open access publishing where researchers receive clear opportunities to publish. That is why we are delighted to be expanding our collaboration with BMJ Group, providing ease of access to funding options for eligible researchers eager to contribute to their accomplished and authoritative portfolio of medical journals.”

New Wiley Partnership with M3 Digital Communications to Expand Reach of Medical Education Programs

January 15, 2025

Wiley, one of the world’s largest publishers and a trusted leader in research and learning, continues to expand the reach of its medical education programs through a new partnership with M3 Digital Communications. This new partnership will enable Wiley’s medical education programs to reach a larger target audience of Japanese medical professionals.

M3 Digital Communications is part of the M3 Group Japan, which operates m3.com, one of the largest dedicated healthcare professional sites in Japan, with over 90% of Japanese physicians registered. The company contributes to the medical industry through integrated digital marketing services, including live streaming, websites, video content, and social media.

As a result of this new partnership, Wiley and M3 Digital Communications will jointly create and distribute new medical content that meets the information needs of Japanese healthcare professionals.

The goal of Wiley’s medical education programs is to improve learning opportunities and drive better patient outcomes.

“We are very excited to be working together with M3 Digital Communications to deliver Wiley’s program, which will help provide medical professionals in Japan with access to information on the latest scientific outcomes, diseases, and treatments,” said Harriet Jeckells, group vice president and general manager, audience solutions. “Wiley’s medical education programs allow healthcare professionals to do their jobs better, and this partnership will substantially expand their reach across Japan.”

Wiley offers validated, authoritative medical education content—including webinars, e-learning modules, online educational hubs, and conference hubs—to help healthcare professionals build knowledge and stay up to date on the latest advances in diagnosis and treatment. This, in turn, can help them make more informed decisions in important and potentially life-saving clinical situations.

ACS announces new strategic plan for 2025-2029

January 15, 2025

Today, the American Chemical Society (ACS) announces its new strategic plan. The ACS Strategic Plan 2025-2029 captures the dynamic nature of the organization by focusing on supporting a global community.

“ACS is a vibrant and visionary society that has been the epicenter for chemical science professionals for nearly 150 years,” says ACS Board of Directors Chair and Director-at-Large Wayne E. Jones Jr. “Our new plan captures that energy and positions the organization to continue to play an important and impactful role moving forward.”

Approved by the ACS Board of Directors in December 2024, the new strategic plan is guided by its commitment to improve all lives through the transforming power of chemistry. Its vision of a world built on science — and its mission to advance scientific knowledge, empower a global community and champion scientific integrity — further defines the path forward for the organization. Running throughout the ACS Strategic Plan is support for sciences broadly, with chemistry at the cornerstone.

The new strategic plan also builds on ACS’ long journey in diversity, equity, inclusion and respect (DEIR). Now, DEIR principles are embedded throughout the plan. These principles are also demonstrated through ACS’ commitment and core values of lifelong learning and inclusion and belonging, while its goals incorporate aspects of accessibility, equity and belonging.

Reviewer Credits and Global Campus launch new partnership

January 15, 2025

Reviewer Credits, the Berlin-based network for peer reviewers and publishing integrity hub, is pleased to announce a new partnership with Global Campus, the platform providing AI-powered solutions to universities, funders, and publishers to enhance academic and research activities. Reviewer Credits will offer the Global Campus platform as a database option for journals and publishers to identify and contact relevant reviewers within the Reviewer Credits Reviewer Finder.

“We are delighted about our new partnership with such a young and innovative company” says Catherine Anderson, Head of Sales at Reviewer Credits. “We look forward to offering more options to our journal and publisher partners to help them to continually improve their peer review processes and to make the valuable work of peer review more visible”.

“This is another great opportunity to make the power of the Global Campus engine available to more people, specifically to all the users of the Reviewer Credits network” says Paul Tuinenburg, CEO of Global Campus. “We are very much looking forward to further strengthening the peer review process with this collaboration.”

Reviewer Credits joins the ACSE as a Corporate Member

January 8, 2025

Reviewer Credits, the Berlin-based network for peer reviewers and publishing integrity hub, is pleased to announce a new partnership with the Asian Council of Science Editors (ACSE). Reviewer Credits has joined ACSE as a Corporate Member, and the partners will collaborate to provide training, recognition, and visibility of peer review to ACSE’s growing network of editors, reviewers, and scholars across Asia.

“We are delighted about our new partnership with such a prestigious organization with an important mission,” says Catherine Anderson, Head of Sales at Reviewer Credits. “We look forward to supporting the members of ACSE in improving their peer review processes and to creating more awareness and recognition of the valuable work reviewers are doing”.

“We are thrilled to welcome Reviewer Credits as a Corporate Member of ACSE,” says Maryam Sayab, Director of Communications at ACSE. “This collaboration marks a significant step forward in our mission to enhance scholarly publishing standards across Asia. By combining Reviewer Credits’ expertise in peer review recognition with ACSE’s commitment to empowering editors and researchers, we aim to foster a culture of excellence, transparency, and collaboration in the academic community.”

Sage expands its portfolio by acquiring business, accounting, finance, and marketing titles from Textbook Media Press

January 8, 2025

Sage continues to build its business portfolio by acquiring titles in accounting, finance, business, and marketing from Textbook Media Press, a publisher of digital and print higher education textbooks.

“We are very excited to further expand our educational offerings for the growing business discipline with a targeted acquisition of titles from Textbook Media Press,” said Reid Hester, vice president in Sage’s US College division. “We look forward to working with a new group of successful, committed authors and welcoming new student and instructor customers to Sage.”

Since 2023, Sage has acquired Chicago Business Press, a textbook publisher focused on mid-to upper-level business, management, marketing, and sales courses; and Hubro Education, a developer of business simulations for academic institutions, corporations, and individual skill development. More recently in 2024, Sage acquired Cambridge Business Publishers with more than 30 titles in accounting and finance and the innovative myBusinessCourse platform.

Sage publishes journals, textbooks, and digital resources, including case studies and skills support on various business topics, such as ethics, human resource management, entrepreneurship, and leadership. Leadership: Theory and Practice, a Sage textbook by Peter Northouse, is the best-selling academic textbook on leadership in the world.

Springer Nature Transformative Agreements show immediate impact on global open access (OA) output

January 8, 2025

New data released by Springer Nature shows the immediate impact Transformative Agreements (TA) have on driving global open access (OA) output, with some countries seeing increases in OA uptake of up to 78% in the first year of their TA.

“Accelerating open access at scale – a look at three transformative agreements” analyses data from across Springer Nature’s TAs with a specific focus on – LYRASIS (USA), SANLiC (South Africa), and the CTK Consortium (Slovenia). It shows that in the first year after their TAs went live:

LYRASIS has seen an immediate growth in OA publications with 533 articles published in the first 6 months of its TA going live, compared to 140 articles in the entire previous 12-month period.
South Africa saw an increase in OA uptake from 10% pre-TA to 78% during first year of TA.
Slovenia saw an increase in OA uptake from 19% pre-TA to 73%.
Other countries whose TAs went live in 2023 have also seen an increase in OA uptake of between 14%-78%, with Portugal seeing the biggest change from 6%-72% (2).

Speaking on the white paper, Carrie Webster, VP Open Access Springer Nature commented:

“Evidence continues to show that TAs represent a sustainable, practical and effective pathway to achieving global OA. As this data shows, they not only have an immediate impact on OA publication but are also ensuring that researchers from across a diverse range of partners – discipline and country – can publish OA and benefit from the greater reach, usage and global impact it affords.

“By pooling resources, adapting to local contexts, and fostering collaboration, TAs are making significant strides toward a future where all research is accessible to everyone. We remain committed to negotiating agreements that are adapted to meet regional needs, ensuring that no one is left behind in the drive towards a more open and equitable scholarly communication landscape”

Other notable findings from the white paper align with data presented in the publisher’s most recent OA report, demonstrating the role TAs have in:

Increasing usage of subscription content – content by affiliated researchers for each of the case study countries increased by as much as 24% in the first year of the agreement.
Increasing equity across disciplines – in several Springer Nature TAs, the percentage of HSS articles published OA has increased by over 2000%. In Slovenia and South Africa OA uptake in HSS increased by over 600% and 800% respectively (from 12% and 9% uptake in year before TA).
Increasing equity across institutions and researchers – by enabling OA publishing for more researchers, including those from historically underfunded areas such as lower research-intensive institutions and early career researchers.

Adrienne Webber, Dean, University Digital Library, Grambling State University, one of the institutions included in the LYRASIS agreement commented:

“It’s benefiting our students and faculty members across the board at HBCUs. It’s giving us an opportunity where we’ve been shut out for so long and not been able to present our ideas in a new format. So, I think it’s groundbreaking for us.”

Data used and analysed for the paper includes company usage data (COUNTER 5), and publicly available citation data (Scopus, Web of Science, CrossRef). The full white paper can be read here.

Springer Nature: Authors, editors and peer reviewers supported with launch of new AI tool

January 8, 2025

Springer Nature has launched a new AI-driven tool to help editors and peer reviewers by automating a number of editorial quality checks and alerting editors to potentially unsuitable manuscripts so that they can be held back from peer review.

Developed in-house, this is the latest AI tool planned for integration into Springer Nature’s next generation article submission and processing platform, Snapp, following the inclusion in 2024 of two AI tools to identify fake content. Working in collaboration with researchers and designed to seamlessly integrate with Snapp, it is currently being tested and verified on over 100 OA journals, including Scientific Reports the largest OA journal in the world, and across over 100,000 submissions.

The AI tool supports editors and peer reviewers by quickly addressing manuscript quality issues, reducing the number of amendments needed, and maintaining the integrity of a high-quality publishing process. In each instance, a human expert double-checks the results before a final decision is made. It marks the next phase of the publisher’s investment in emerging technologies to enhance the publishing experience for researchers, editors and reviewers, all of which are developed in line with its AI principles.

Chief Publishing Officer, Harsh Jegadeesan, said: “Publishing trusted research is at the heart of what we do. As the volume of research increases, we are excited to see how we can best use AI to support our authors, editors and peer reviewers, simplifying their ways of working whilst upholding quality. By carefully introducing new ways of checking papers to enhance research integrity and support editorial decision-making we can help speed up everyday tasks for researchers, freeing them up to concentrate on what matters to them – conducting research.”

14 suitability assessment steps are currently supported before a manuscript is sent out to review including data availability statements, human and animal ethics, clinical trials and misuse threats.

More on Springer Nature’s approach to AI and its use within our communities can be found here.