Springer Nature believes that open research benefits not only the research community but society as a whole. This is particularly the case where that research relates to one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with the ambition of solving some of the world’s biggest challenges. As such, our partnership with the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) and the Dutch University Libraries and the National Library consortium (UKB) is a valuable exploration of where knowledge exchange and tool development can help to accelerate a transition to an open future. Together, our partnership has resulted in a new public SDG classifier, enabling researchers, institutions and funders to explore all research publisher content for a specific SDG; a deeper understanding of how content is being consumed by non-academic audiences (the topic of this white paper); and, as a final result of the project, a new toolkit for researchers to maximise their societal relevance (forthcoming). From the results of this collaboration, it is clear that open research is enabling widespread use of academic content by a substantial number of non-academic audiences. From charities and NGOs, to educators, governments, corporates and industry, there are many beneficiaries when content is more easily accessible.
Steven Inchcoombe, Chief Publishing Officer, Springer Nature
We knew from our own previous research that there is a direct benefit to the individual researcher in increased usage and reach for their open access (OA) document or book chapter, but this is further reinforced here by looking both at the bibliometric picture and additionally the deeper analysis of who the direct beneficiaries of the work are. This proves that there is a real tangible societal impact where research is open. The case study of research output from the Netherlands provides a particularly strong argument in support of a national OA strategy, finding nearly twice as many downloads of SDG content compared with the global average. The Netherlands was our first Transformative Agreement partner in 2015, with our goals very clearly aligned in shifting funding and resources towards an open research future. Their results here demonstrate the impact of such a strategy, and strengthens the argument for a central, national infrastructure to enable OA uptake. These findings must spur us on towards a coordinated effort to ensure that Gold OA is supported on a wider scale, and to ensure there is continued acceleration towards addressing the SDGs.
The Dutch government envisions that research output based on (partly) publicly financed research should be publicly and freely available to the world. OA to the latest scientific insights potentially enables and accelerates not only research innovation itself and dealing with grand societal challenges. Moreover, the public availability of research output will result in a situation such that public interest groups, policymakers, industry, teachers etc. are up to date, informed and make use of science in optima forma, creating societal impact. The current partnership of VSNU and the Dutch Association of University Libraries and Royal Library with Springer Nature aims at making this societal impact visible. An important outcome of the report, that the online usage and attention advantage from OA is much bigger than the observed citation advantage, supports the assumption that one of the main advantages of open access is that it reaches a substantial number of user groups outside of academia that typically don’t have access to a large amount of subscription journals. This white paper clearly reveals this impact and can be regarded as a building block for the translation to researchers, supporting them in working on societal impact.
Ingrid Wijk, UKB, Director Maastricht University Library
