NPG/Digital Science Content Sharing Experiment Lessons Learned – 1 Year On Nicko Goncharoff Director of Publisher Relations Digital Science Grace Baynes Director, Business Operations and Policy Springer Nature

Starting point: the problem we sought to solve ●Scientists have always shared their work … helping them do so is central to Nature’s mission ●It’s what the WWW was invented for… and researchers in their millions are now taking full advantage SO WHAT? ●Tools are sub-optimal (Dropbox; I can haz PDF) ●It’s a black box: for publishers/libraries ●It creates conflict: take-down notices = reputational damage

Why Now? Scope of sharing expanding rapidly with internet tools and networks Authors want better tools for sharing their work Being passive did not seem a viable approach An experiment was the only way to learn how to best facilitate sharing and measure opportunities and risks

Experiment Partners – Dec 2014 Has duty to readers and authors to facilitate sharing that benefits research and is commercially viable Had the components (content, technology, policy) to take this first step, learn, and share results Opportunity for ReadCube to better serve researcher, institutional, and publisher customers

Our approach…. Nature wanted to: ● Encourage sharing: on its own platform (nature.com); then on 3rd party platforms ● Find solutions to making sharing COUNTER-compliant ● Understand usage & need ● Provide data and experience to inform constructive discussion & solutions across the industry

NPG Content/Policy + Digital Science Technology 49 NPG Journal Full Text Articles ReadCube Connect ‘Enhanced PDF’ technology Shareable read-only, full- text articles on nature.com

Sharing Methods Media Referral Readers access full-text journal articles on nature.com cited on 100 trusted news and blog sites Peer-to-Peer Subscribers send or post shareable links to NPG journal article on nature.com

Parameters Two types of sharing Peer-to-peer Media referral Read-only access to full text articles on nature.com Use results and feedback to evolve sharing features, policy and commercial models Share results with research and publisher communities Supported by a “beta” policy and T&C’s 12-month pilot (but expect it to be long-term)

Sharing Statistics – Dec Nov Commentary About 815K ‘shared views’ during period Most (~630K) views are referrals from whitelist media sites Of ~184K Peer-to-Peer shares: 67% (123K) subscribers to non- subscribers 33% (61K) subscriber- subscriber or OA content

Sharing Activity - Top Five CountryJournalMedia

Conclusions Steady usage, but modest numbers Do we need to better promote among researchers? Bulk of views are media referrals Activity influenced by news events Coverage of major Nature papers causes spikes in views Media referral fits into reader workflow; peer-to-peer sharing possibly less so P2P sharing is mostly between subscribers and non-subscribers, with the remainder often between two people who already have access No downturn in single-article sales Little to no instances of abuse observed

What we learnt from the community response Some good... Lots of media & social media interest Generally positive Some bad... Open Access: misunderstood as a move away from gold/green OA by some DRM: consternation & concerns

What’s Next? Springer Nature to continue offering on-platform sharing –Will look at ways to expand services to authors and readers –Beta policy extended Springer Nature & Digital Science to continue supporting STM content sharing policy efforts –Includes participation in ‘article tagging’ sub-group tasked with developing prototype to enable public sharing across multiple publishers and platforms On-platform article sharing now a part of ReadCube’s Connect Enhanced PDF product