Springer Nature Book Series To Address Research Pain Points

NISO Member News

Heidelberg | London, 21 February 2022

Springer Nature and RWTH Aachen University’s Cluster of Excellence Internet of Production have created a new publishing format called Crosstracts to address two research challenges. It can often take a long time for research results to be published and so are not getting back to the lecture hall fast enough. Moreover, opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration are limited, connections across academic disciplines that are needed to help find solutions to global challenges are being lost.

Crosstracts will therefore speed up the time between research and publication and improve collaboration between researchers of different disciplines by:

1. Publishing and disseminating research results as soon as they are finalised without having to wait for the whole book to be completed by harnessing Springer Nature’s Online First and Live Reference capability.
2.  Having an in-built publishing requirement that at least one peer reviewer is selected from a different discipline. 

By embedding these processes directly into the publishing process, research findings will be able to be shared faster with collaboration across the disciplines becoming a regular occurrence. 

Henning Schoenenberger, Director Books Publishing Solutions, said, “Our new concept is a great example of how collaboration can foster excellence and change for problem-driven, purpose-driven, and experience-driven user research. This will boost the creation of cross-discipline communities, achieve a positive impact on global challenges, and find societal recognition.” 

Melanie Buchsbaum, Managing Director of the Cluster of Excellence Internet of Production at RWTH Aachen, expressed her views, “We are pleased that we can innovatively rethink and implement the ideas of the new collaborative research  -- not only for production technology itself, but also for the field of publishing.”

The output will be published as a book series, Interdisciplinary Excellence Accelerator Series (IDEAS). The first book of the series, to be published in 2022, will be Internet of Production: Fundamentals, Applications and Proceedings. 

The book series and collaboration originated from a Springer Nature Publishing Lab, a workshop format between the Springer Nature Publishing Solution’s team and selected academic partners. The one or two-day workshops focus on critical issues in the research knowledge transfer. They aim to help understand researchers’ needs and pain points and explore ideas for potential solutions.