Extension of strategic collaboration with Springer Nature

The OU has extended its strategic collaboration with the global publisher, Springer Nature until March 2022.

This brings the total value of the contract to £340,000 which started between the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute’s Scholarly Knowledge Mining team (SKM) and Springer Nature in 2014.

During these years, the SKM team has established itself as one of the leading international research groups in scholarly analytics, in no small measure thanks to the financial support provided by Springer Nature and the massive added value derived from such a close collaboration with one of the top international academic publishers.

This collaboration has enabled the SKM team to ground their research in concrete business requirements, leading to several innovative resources and applications. These include the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), the largest taxonomy of Computer Science research areas currently available, which has been formally adopted by Springer Nature; and the Smart Topic Miner (STM), an innovative application, in routine use at Springer Nature, which automatically classifies conference proceedings in Computer Science with the relevant topics in CSO.

Other recent results include the Academia/Industry Dynamics Knowledge Graph (AIDA), an innovative resource characterizing 14 million publications and eight million patents according to their research topics and industrial sectors and the Artificial Intelligence Knowledge Graph (AI-KG), which describes 850,000 scholarly entities relevant to Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, according to 1.2 million statements extracted from 333,000 articles in AI.

Enrico Motta, Professor of Knowledge Technologies at KMi said: “The latest chapter of this exciting partnership will focus on developing new solutions able to predict accurately the key trends associated with both the generation and consumption of scholarly publications, a highly challenging research task whose successful solution will enable robust, data-driven decision-making for both editorial and marketing teams at Springer Nature.”

Find out more about research at the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute