Springer Nature and The Lens Partner

NISO Member News

London | Canberra | November 10, 2022

Springer Nature and The Lens today announced a major partnership that will give better insights into how academic research and data can accelerate innovative problem solving with economic and social outcomes. By better connecting science, investment and enterprise open data, the partnership aims to provide the insight needed by diverse stakeholders to coordinate their capabilities to deliver evidence-based action for climate change and other global challenges.

Through this partnership, The Lens’ open knowledge platform of hundreds of millions of patents and publications will be further linked with Springer Nature’s database of tens of millions of pieces of scholarly literature. 

By linking diverse knowledge sets, including research publications and patents, and making the content more accessible, discoverable and understandable to people and institutions globally, it is possible to accelerate the use of science to advance real-world outcomes of academic research. For example, research published by Springer Nature has been cited over 2.5 million times in nearly a million patent records, showing how and which enterprises and products have been informed and influenced by these scientific findings. This knowledge helps business, academia, government and civil society create the right partnerships, identify opportunities, limit risks and chart trajectories to create the tangible products and practice changes that society urgently needs.

Richard Jefferson, Founder and CEO of The Lens, commented: 

“Our crises are shared. So must be our solutions. Science alone is not enough and business as usual will not get us there. We need to jump-start inclusive and deliberate problem solving that engages all the world’s people and institutions in evidence-driven partnerships. That is why ahead of meetings such as COP27, we are delighted to be able to work with Springer Nature - an iconic institution in scholarly publishing - connecting our resources and delivering solutions that demonstrate the importance of research in driving evidence-based policy and investment decisions.”

The Lens will index full text and abstracts from Springer Nature’s over 12 million research works. These will sit alongside the full portfolio of patent and scholarly works data from the Lens, including the citation links between patents and cited scholarly works, as well as the full open scholarly citation graph. By linking resources in this way, deeper metrics, analytics and insight will be able to be obtained for all sectors and institutions globally, with an equitable access policy and commitment to user privacy. 

Harsh Jegadeesan, Chief Solutions Officer, Springer Nature, said:

“With research budgets across the world under pressure, funders and governments need better guidance to know the areas to invest in where tangible results can be delivered - being able to quantify the impact of research, and help guide the wider community to where those gaps for action are, is a key part of that. Through this partnership, we seek to be able to better support that discovery and connection of evidence to action, and drive knowledge forwards to better address the challenges that humanity faces.”

More on the aims and output of the partnership can be found in a comment piece from Richard Jefferson here.

About These Organizations

About Springer Nature

For over 180 years Springer Nature has been advancing discovery by providing the best possible service to the whole research community. We help researchers uncover new ideas, make sure all the research we publish is significant, robust and stands up to objective scrutiny, that it reaches all relevant audiences in the best possible format, and can be discovered, accessed, used, re-used and shared. We support librarians and institutions with innovations in technology and data; and provide quality publishing support to societies. 

As a research publisher, Springer Nature is home to trusted brands including Springer, Nature Portfolio, BMC, Palgrave Macmillan and Scientific American. For more information, please visit springernature.com and @SpringerNature.

About The Lens

The Lens is a world leader in providing free and open discovery and analysis of worldwide patents and research knowledge, serving 249M+ scholarly work records, 143M+ patent documents from over 100 countries, and 433M+ biological sequences extracted from patents. The Lens has been operating for over twenty years as a project of the long-established non-profit social enterprise Cambia (doing business as The Lens), with support from leading global philanthropies and public institutions. Over the last years Lens is approaching full sustainability using a unique revenue model that keeps all data as open and globally accessible, while licensing toolkits to institutions and companies, with fees tiered by what they can afford. For the global south all the tools are available at no cost to public good entities, for example.