We believe that data should be open, accessible and reusable. Data sharing helps speed up the pace of discovery and its benefits to society.

As a proactive partner to the research community, Springer Nature is pioneering new approaches to data sharing and open data. We’re committed to supporting researchers in sharing their data, helping to make data sharing the new normal.

Data publishing

Through data publishing, we aim to make scientific data more reusable, discoverable, interpretable, and citable.

We facilitate data publishing in open access journals Scientific Data and BMC Research Notes; through Registered Reports in BMC journals; and pilot projects on data citation and data badges.

Springer Nature’s flagship open data journal, Scientific Data, offers authors the opportunity to describe and share their research data with a wide audience. 

BMC Research Notes publishes dark data - single observations, short null results, orphan data and confirmatory results. The ‘data note’ article type offers authors a peer-reviewed, citeable summary of their data.

Our research data helpdesk helps authors and editors find out how best to deal with their data and understand funder and institute mandates. With journal-level research data policies, we ensure that the data at the heart of scholarly research are appropriately archived and, where possible, widely accessible.

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Supporting open data sharing

Open science is about innovation. We are committed to building on our open science policies with practical tools that help researchers share data, code and methods when they publish with us.

Here we outline some of the solutions that have been piloted on selected journals and are now being progressively integrated more widely across Springer Nature portfolios. 

Integrated data sharing with figshare 

  • Authors can upload and publish datasets directly during manuscript submission, without leaving the submission system.
  1. Simplifies the process of depositing and linking data 
  2. Improves compliance with journal and funder requirements 
  3. Increases visibility and reuse of datasets

Impact

  • Increased use of repositories and measurable growth in data sharing following integration (12% increase in published data at piloted journals) 
  • Evidence of higher citation impact for articles with linked datasets in some fields

Featured white papers and reports

We monitor data sharing attitudes and behaviours, building evidence and advocating for good data practice. Discover our latest white papers and reports:






Why openly share research data?

Community involvement

We work with the scientific community in a variety of ways to improve data management and publication. We also support a number of education and best practice initiatives.

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Henning Schoenenberger, Standards and Technology Executive Committee (STEC) 

Graham Smith, Research Data Implementation Group


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Graham Smith, Working group co-chair (FAIRsharing Registry: Connecting data policies, standards and databases RDA working group)

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Tristan Matthews, Board member

CODATA

Graham Smith, International Data Policy Committee

CoARA 

Graham Smith, Ethics and Research Integrity Policy Working Group (ERIP)

Open Science Monitoring Initiative

Graham Smith, WG3, Open science monitoring with scholarly content providers