On March 1st, Springer Nature unveiled a unified open code policy for both books and journals, complementing its singular data policy announced last year. This latest initiative aims to facilitate authors' increased participation and benefits from open scientific research practices.
Due to restricted access to research code, the verification and utilization of critical findings face significant limitations, hindering researchers from validating and leveraging existing scientific knowledge to address pressing challenges. Despite this, many scientific publications lack direct and usable comprehensive guidelines for timely sharing of code. Building on its longstanding support for open science research practices, Springer Nature seeks to address this issue by enhancing the visibility, clarity, and workflow of code sharing across all its publications.
Erika Pastrana, Editorial Director for the Nature Health and Applied Sciences series, emphasized the unquestionable importance of encouraging a code-sharing policy. "Code sharing is at the core of the open science movement, serving as a key driver for advancing scientific progress and maintaining efficiency. Publishing institutions and editors play a crucial role in supporting and promoting open science practices. This policy will make it easier for Springer Nature's editors, authors, and reviewers to support the public release of open code, integrating it into the submission process for journals and books, ensuring full reproducibility and replication of research, thus propelling knowledge and science forward."
As outlined, all journal articles published by Springer Nature will now include a "Code Availability" section, encouraging authors to publicly share their code using permanent identifiers and citing the code used. Journals with existing code-sharing policies will remain unchanged. For journals without current policies, implementation will be gradual as they integrate into Springer Nature's article processing platform, Snapp – the institution's next-generation peer review platform. Snapp provides authors with a streamlined and unified workflow for managing their article submissions. For books, this policy will be immediately effective, encouraging authors to share their code in public repositories. All book authors will receive support to share the code related to their original research when publishing books or chapters.
