In future, Springer will be working closely with the Edanz Group, an editing service for scientific manuscripts, thus stepping up its hands-on support for authors. The Edanz Group helps international authors whose first language is not English by providing professional editing services before their manuscripts are published.
As part of this partnership, Springer and Edanz organize workshops for scientific authors throughout the world. Most of the author workshops are held in regions in which researchers have not published much in English to date. Universities and research institutes in the countries are teaming up with Springer and Edanz to invite scientists wanting to prepare their scientific papers as well as possible before they submit them for publication. In 2011, several hundred participants in the Middle East and in Latin America already attended a workshop on scientific publishing. Further events will be held in Asia, Southern Europe and the Middle East before the end of the year, and these will be continued on an increasing scale in 2012 too.
"Papers submitted to scientific journals often have to be rejected right at the start of the peer review process despite their scientific relevance because they do not meet the formal and linguistic requirements at an international level. Particularly authors from countries in which international publishing has only started to get off the ground over the past few years find it difficult to publish their work. We would like to help these authors overcome this crucial obstacle," said Anita Bürk, Director Strategic Marketing Development at Springer.
Springer has considerably extended its services for authors in recent years. At springer.com, authors can find the Springer Author Academy, the online equivalent of the face-to-face author workshops. These pages provide basic help on the type and structure of the manuscript, preparing figures and selecting the right journal. In autumn 2011, extensive notes about the peer review process and about book publications will be added. All the pages of the Author Academy are already available in English and Chinese, soon to be supplemented by Spanish, Portuguese, Korean and Japanese.
On the Springer journal homepages, authors looking for specific help on language and formal matters are encouraged to contact Edanz directly. The global partnership with Springer means that Edanz can offer these authors a ten percent discount on the cost of scientific editing of their manuscript.