Publisher’s Report Spinal Cord & Spinal Cord Series and Cases

1. Publisher’s ReportSpinal Cord & Spinal Cord Series and Cases Tuesday 13th September 2016 ISCoS Annual Meeting, Vienna Nickie Roake Publishing Manager

3. Highlights 2016 • Launched Editor’s Choice feature for both journals. • “Hot Articles in Neuroscience” email campaigns. • Worked with ISCoS to set up member referral access via Society’s new website. • Held two Section Editors’ conference calls. • Section Editors are commissioning paid-for Reviews in Spinal Cord (SC)to increase quality of content. • Plan in place to reduce SC’s backlog. • Spinal Cord Series and Cases (SCS&C) has received 94 submissions and published 38 papers by June 2016. • SCS&C moved to continuous publication from July 2016. • Plans to introduce an immediate open access option for SCS&C by end of 2016. • SCS&C indexing update: passed Scientific Review at PMC. Addressing open access options before completing Technical Review. Target to be indexed by end of 2016.

4. Editorial Performance: Spinal Cord • The total number of submissions by the end of June 2016 was 181. This is a 24% decrease compared to the same time last year (but 2015 was noticeably up on 2014). • The average time from manuscript submission to first decision after peer review is 47 days. This is an improvement of 10 days compared to 2015. The average time to submission to first decision without peer review is 9 days, an increase of 2 days compared to 2015. • The current rejection rate is 55%, which is an increase of 9% compared to 2015.

5. Editorial Performance: Spinal Cord Series and Cases • The total number of submissions by the end of June 2016 was 33. • 8 papers have been transferred to SCS&C from SC via the official transfer option in eJP. • The rejection rate increased from 16% in 2015 to 36% by end of June 2016. • The average time from manuscript submission to first decision after peer review is 47 days. This is an improvement of 10 days compared to the end of 2015. The average time to submission to first decision without peer review is 9 days, an increase of 2 days compared to the end of 2015.

6. Editorial Performance: Spinal Cord Geographic spread of submissions 2015 Geographic spread of accepted papers 2015 • The highest number of submissions come from authors based in Europe (33%), China and Japan (24%) and USA and Canada (15%). • The highest number of accepted papers came from authors based in Europe (46%), USA and Canada (18%) and China and Japan (12%).

7. Editorial Performance: Spinal Cord Series and Cases6 Geographic spread of submissions 2015 Geographic spread of accepted papers 2015 • In 2015 the highest number of submissions has come from authors based in Europe (31%), China and Japan (18%) and Middle East and India (15%). • The highest number of accepted papers came from authors based in Europe (28%), USA and Canada (19%) and China and Japan (16%).

8. Production: Spinal Cord • Average time to online publication remains steady at 30 business days • Average time to print publication has increased to 155 business days • Increased length of papers and high acceptance rate resulted in 10 month backlog, with 30 fewer papers being published within the allocated page budget compared to the same time last year. • Decision taken in August 2016 to double pagination for Sept-March issues.

9. Production: Spinal Cord Series and Cases • Publication times: • Average time to online quarterly publication = 60 business days • Average time to continuous publication = 24 business days

10. 2015 Online Usage: Spinal Cord

11. 2015 Online Usage: Spinal Cord Series and Cases

12. Spinal Cord Spinal Cord 2015 Impact Factor • Spinal Cord’s 2015 impact factor has fallen to 1.546 from 1.804 in 2014. Its 5-year impact factor increases to 1.876 from 1.846 in 2014. • Spinal Cord falls 23 places in the Clinical Neurology JCR category and now ranks 144th/192. • The total number of articles counting towards the denominator was 328 and the total number of citations received was 507. This is a decrease of 83 citations received compared to the 2014 impact factor. • 8% of articles were cited 4-9 times, 45% of articles were cited 1-3 times. • 47% of articles were not cited in 2015.

13. Top Cited Articles published in 2013-2014, cited in 2015 (2015 IF)

14. Competitor AnalysisThe below table outlines key data for competitor titles

15. Journal Development • Below are the key areas for journal development going forwards: • Maintaining positive working relations with key Society representatives • Continue to hold regular meetings, including an annual development day • Assist in Editorial Office handover/ support • Support the Society in the recruitment process for a new Editor-in-Chief. • Editorial focus and workflows • Review Aims and Scope of SC and SCS&C. What distinguishes them? Is SCS&C becoming more than a case reports journal? We need to develop clear independent messaging to promote both journals. • Ease of submission, prompt turnaround and high standards of peer review are key for authors when choosing where to submit. It is important to regularly review editorial workflows and to ascertain how we can make these more efficient and ever more timely. • SC Impact Factor • Aspiration is to see SC achieve, and consistently maintain, an Impact Factor of over 3. Commissioning of highly quality articles and reviews, and more stringent acceptance criteria are crucial. Submission campaign to our previous highly-cited authors. • Establishing and positioning SCS&C • Indexing applications, create immediate open access option and review archive embargo. • Systems and content delivery • SC and SCS&C will migrate shortly to our new web content platform, providing a modern, fresh look, with improved functionality including article level metrics. We are also shortly to introduce a new production workflow. • Growing revenue • As Springer Nature, and with an enhanced institutional sales base, we have developed and presented new sales models to achieve ever-more wider visibility and usage. Open access will continue to be prominent. Explore further how to draw benefits from closer collaboration with relevant Springer Nature titles e.g. Nature Outlooks, sponsored collections , book series.

16. Marketing Focus on: Buildingjournal profiles and cross promoting with other relevant neuroscience journals; Sustaining readership and usage of SCand SCS&C content; Encouraging high quality author submissions. A proportion of activities this year have focused on the ISCoS 2016 meeting including collateral for the exhibitors booth, How to Get Published booklets and branded giveaways. Below is a snapshot of some of the other recent campaigns deployed and the results generated:

17. Springer Nature • A strategic merger between three famous publishers • In May 2015 we announced the creation of Springer Nature - a major new force in academic, scientific and educational publishing. • Our name reflects the strong heritage of our long-lived international publishing brands: Nature and Springer. • The Joint Venture partners are Holtzbrinck, a family owned German media group, and the owners of Nature Publishing Group and its parent Macmillan, and BC Partners, the venture capital owners of Springer Science + Business Media. • We are currently busy with a variety of integration projects, there are over 150, bringing together our businesses., systems and processes. This is a significant undertaking. Our new combined business has 13,000 employees and operates from over 50 offices located across the globe - where our customers need us. We are keen to ensure we maintain the best of our mutual existing processes, seeking greater visibility, improved systems and superior service, as we come together.

18. Springer Nature • OUR MISSION: • To help researchers, students, teachers, and professionals to achieve and discover more • We help researchers bring their research to the world by publishing across the research spectrum – breadth, depth and impact. • We make research discoverable and useful so it has the maximum impact within the research community and society at large. • We help researchers, and the institutions and funders that support them, to identify the research data and the trends that are most relevant to them and to put that information into context so they can be more effective, efficient and successful. • We break down the barriers between the disciplines to make research more accessible and to accelerate discovery.

19. Protecting and growing revenues • We have released a new subscription model for our journals that has been formally announced for 2017 products – ISMEJ is included in the package deals we offer to our librarian customers. We have already begun outreach in 2016 to deliver initial revenues. • We see these as evolutionary changes to existing models which will deliver sales growth, increased usage, readership and ultimately quantity and quality of submission of articles. • This is an exciting and positive opportunity to leverage the dual strengths of the two sides of our business. - Springer’s industry-leading operational back-end and “bundle” model has allowed us to penetrate a significant percentage of the global market, consistently showing growth. - Nature’s strengths have been in maximizing potential revenue per journal on a smaller customer base with individual journal purchases, while retaining industry-leading quality and customer and author services.

20. Serving authors and readers • Our author and reader services are at the heart of what we do. We will see a number of changes to the way we operate over the coming months as the Springer and Nature sides of our Joint Venture come yet closer together. • The overriding objective is to enable easier and faster submission, support of high quality peer review, excellent content preparation, and, further downstream, enhanced discoverability, delivery, and functionality. Production processes • In 2016, we will take advantage of the synergies enabled by the creation of Springer Nature by implementing the Journal Workflow . JWF is a production workflow system built, upgraded, and in continual and successful use at Springer for about 10 years. Currently over 260,000 articles across more than 2,000 journal titles are produced annually in the JWF. It is an efficient and timely service as witnessed by editors, staff and authors. • A goal of the JWF is to utilize automated processes where possible so that journal articles can be published for the scientific community within as short a time period as possible. • Bearing in mind outliers, currently ISMEJ operates at an average time to final online publication from receipt to production of 32 days. The Springer JWF Turn Around Time (TAT) average is 18 days from receipt of accepted manuscript to online publication. Authors are also able to track the progress of their article through the Workflow. • An associated aspect of this goal is that the JWF allows articles to be produced in such a way so that no matter what the final reading device the user utilizes: hardcopy, desktop, smartphone, tablet, or even a watch, the production quality of the article will be consistent and accurate. We are currently reviewing suppliers and our overall mechanisms, but anticipate roll-out of the JWF initially in Q4 of 2016. We will fully brief you prior to any changes.

21. A new web platform • We are developing a Springer Nature combined platform and website design for nature.com, with the aim of providing a modern platform to meet the needs of our users, authors and editors and which will allow us to make continuous improvements over time. • You can see the new design on some Nature Research Journals already (for example Nature Plantsand Scientific Reports), Nature Partner Journals (for example npj Microgravity) and on the academic journal Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy. • We are now in the process of planning the migration of journals from legacy systems and styles to benefit from our new platform and design. The new design has a number of advantages compared to the legacy styles: • Updated, modern design across the site with a clean journal homepage for ease of navigation • New functionality on article pages, including a way to quickly navigate between article sections, or view figures alongside text, in the right-hand column • Improved ability to highlight articles of interest or topical announcements on the journal homepage • Integration of article level metrics to surface ‘trending’ articles on the journal homepage, which will display articles from the journal which have been most read or had a recent increase in Altmetric score • .

22. Systems and content delivery • Content Sharing • As recently discussed with ISME, to assist authors in disseminating their research, swiftly and legally, to the wider community, we will shortly be providing authors with the ability to generate a unique shareable link that will allow anyone to read a view-only version of the published article. We believe this will enable more and swifter visibility for research. Authors will be encouraged to share these links. • Online Submission and Manuscript Tracking Systems • Our existing submission platform, Electronic Journal Press (eJP), was launched in 2005 and since then continuous developments have been made to accommodate new requirements and developments. Still, we are at an early stage of developing a replacement for eJP. As with our website evolution, we are taking into account developments across our new, larger business, Springer Nature, and seeking a unified solution. • We are particularly interested in developing a rich set of tools that will aid authors, editors, and peer reviewers to do what they need to do in a broad variety of ways. We typify this as a “broad-gate approach” through which articles under review will travel. • While our current priority is website evolution, we here wish to inform you that we will be taking forward significant development of our online submission and manuscript tracking system over the next 12 to 24 months.

23. Any Questions? Thank you • David Bull Editorial Director, Biomedicine david.bull@springernature.com • Nickie RoakePublishing Manager, Biomedicinenickie.roake@nature.com