At the 2010 American Library Association meeting, Springer launched SpringerOpen, an all-open access imprint. We modeled its philosophy, mission, approach, and best practices on those from BioMed Central, which had joined Springer 3 years earlier. We launched with 12 journals, and most of them are going strong.
(And actually these were not Springer’s first all-OA journals—our first—Nanoscale Research Letters—would later join the SpringerOpen imprint.)
In fact, SpringerOpen’s journal stable has expanded by around 10-fold in these past five years—and we are still growing. We are working hard to raise awareness of the benefits—and, yes, the quality of our open access journals across all disciplines. And especially focus beyond open access’s biomedical “native ground,” and probably working harder than anyone to promote open access in disciplines like physics, materials science, geoscience, math, and more.
And in 2012 we launched our megajournal, SpringerPlus, which publishes across all disciplines, with rigorous peer review but without “significance” judgments.
Future plans and developments
SpringerOpen continues to grow; our journals are taking off and publishing more articles every day. And we are also adding new journals to the list, like the Max Planck “Living” journals, Living Reviews in Relativity, Living Reviews in Solar Physics, and Living Reviews in Computational Astrophysics, just announced last week.
And we’re also investing in increased visibility and advocacy for open access, especially in disciplines beyond biomedicine. This blog is one example; as is our increased visibility at Springer exhibit booths (recall).
We’re excited about the future—of SpringerOpen and of open access generally speaking. And while the team here is generally more future-focused, it’s good at a time like this to take a quick look back at where we’ve been.
