Introduction

In 2019, Springer Nature partnered with VSNU and UKB to jointly explore and answer the question “Is open research facilitating progress on global, grand societal challenges?”
The UN’s SDGs were chosen as some of the world’s most pressing challenges, from good health to peace, justice, and strong institutions.
We wanted to investigate whether we could see any signs that open research is beneficial for user groups outside of the core academic readership, focusing in particular on research that has a strong societal connection. Where a number of studies have investigated the potential reach of OA, including a previous study of Hybrid journals by Springer Nature, very few have investigated the readership of this work in any detail.In his 2010 analysis of APS journal documents, Phil Davis concluded that “the real beneficiaries of OA may not be the scientific author community … but communities of practice that consume, but rarely contribute to, the corpus of literature. These individuals may include students, educators, physicians, patients, and researchers employed by private industry who depend on the publication of scientific literature. This assumes that OA reaches a number of user groups outside of academia that typically don’t have access to Subscription journals.
To begin to explore this further, for this white paper we have undertaken two separate projects. Firstly, a bibliometric analysis of SDG-related content, exploring whether we could see any signs that OA is particularly beneficial for user groups outside of the core academic readership. Secondly, we ran a user survey on Springer Nature’s SpringerLink, Nature and BioMed Central online publishing platforms to ask readers more about themselves.
Our underlying hypothesis was that a higher utilisation of OA content could indicate that these documents are reaching many more stakeholder groups outside of the core academic segment, which typically subscribe to or license a large number of academic/scholarly publications and are by far the largest customer group of academic/scholarly publishers. By asking readers on our platforms more about themselves, we learn more about the volume of readership coming from non-academic users, and in addition who they are, for what purposes they use research content, and how this differs from the core academic user base.