Springer Nature and The Lens tackling global challenges

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Springer Nature and The Lens have 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 (lens.org) 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.