Springer and the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources (JUSTICE) recently signed a comprehensive agreement for current electronic journal subscriptions and online journal back files on SpringerLink (www.springerlink.com). Springer will provide access to 1,000 journals in the Springer Journal Archives from the first volume published up to 1999. Springer will also provide files to the National Institute of Informatics (NII). All universities in Japan will have access via NII-REO (http://reo.nii.ac.jp/oja/?lang=en).

This agreement represents a cooperative milestone that creates a national infrastructure for academic information. Furthermore, with essential support from the NII, Springer and JUSTICE have agreed to reduce annual price increases for the current electronic journal subscriptions in this new framework.

Mr. Koichi Ojiro, Director of the JUSTICE office, said, “The mutual trust we have with Springer allows us to support many university libraries which suffer from information gaps in their infrastructure and we hope that this model agreement will be followed by other STM publishers. Springer is not only a business partner but a real supporter of our work.”

“It is Springer’s mission to make its valuable content easily accessible for as many students and researchers as possible. This obviously applies to its current content but also for the journal back files. By concluding this agreement with Springer as well as with NII and JUSTICE, who are the most important and long-standing partners in Japan, we have taken yet another important step in Japan”, said Peter Coebergh, Springer’s President Corporate Markets, Healthcare & Asia-Pacific Sales.

Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) is a leading global scientific publisher, delivering quality content through innovative information products and services. The company is also a trusted provider of local-language professional publications in Europe, especially in Germany and the Netherlands. In the science, technology and medicine (STM) sector, the group publishes around 2,000 journals and more than 7,000 new books a year, as well as the largest STM eBook Collection worldwide. Springer has operations in roughly 20 countries in Europe, the USA, and Asia, and more than 5,500 employees. In 2010, it generated annual sales of around EUR 866 million.

Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources (JUSTICE) is a newly established consortium that merges two former academic consortia in Japan: JANUL, which is the National University consortium with 87 members; and PULC, a private and public university consortium with 408 members.

Partnership with international scientific editing team

In future, Springer will be working closely with the Edanz Group, an editing service for scientific manuscripts, thus stepping up its hands-on support for authors. The Edanz Group helps international authors whose first language is not English by providing professional editing services before their manuscripts are published.

As part of this partnership, Springer and Edanz organize workshops for scientific authors throughout the world. Most of the author workshops are held in regions in which researchers have not published much in English to date. Universities and research institutes in the countries are teaming up with Springer and Edanz to invite scientists wanting to prepare their scientific papers as well as possible before they submit them for publication. In 2011, several hundred participants in the Middle East and in Latin America already attended a workshop on scientific publishing. Further events will be held in Asia, Southern Europe and the Middle East before the end of the year, and these will be continued on an increasing scale in 2012 too.

“Papers submitted to scientific journals often have to be rejected right at the start of the peer review process despite their scientific relevance because they do not meet the formal and linguistic requirements at an international level. Particularly authors from countries in which international publishing has only started to get off the ground over the past few years find it difficult to publish their work. We would like to help these authors overcome this crucial obstacle,” said Anita Bürk, Director Strategic Marketing Development at Springer.

Springer has considerably extended its services for authors in recent years. At springer.com, authors can find the Springer Author Academy, the online equivalent of the face-to-face author workshops. These pages provide basic help on the type and structure of the manuscript, preparing figures and selecting the right journal. In autumn 2011, extensive notes about the peer review process and about book publications will be added. All the pages of the Author Academy are already available in English and Chinese, soon to be supplemented by Spanish, Portuguese, Korean and Japanese.

On the Springer journal homepages, authors looking for specific help on language and formal matters are encouraged to contact Edanz directly. The global partnership with Springer means that Edanz can offer these authors a ten percent discount on the cost of scientific editing of their manuscript.