Springer Nature and Google DeepMind collaborate to enhance the peer review experience. Springer Nature October 27, 2026 London, Berlin, New York - 26th October 2026. Peer reviewers play an essential role in safeguarding the quality and integrity of published research. With this in mind, Springer Nature and Google DeepMind are announcing a research partnership to co-design an AI peer review assistant to explore how technology can help create a more rewarding reviewer experience. The assistant will help researchers to review papers more effectively, support them in navigating manuscripts, and identify areas that may need closer attention so they can spend more time on the questions that require specialist scientific judgement. The partnership brings together Springer Nature's expertise in managing peer review and Google DeepMind's frontier Gemini models. Building on Google's experience in developing proven agentic research tools like ScholarPeer and Deep Review, the new assistant helps reviewers analyse large amounts of text, charts, and figures. The prototype assistant currently being tested will help re-envision peer review as an interactive experience that uses AI to empower scientific experts while keeping expert human judgment at the centre of the process. This project is part of Springer Nature's ongoing commitment to deliver a more frictionless publishing process for authors and peer reviewers which includes its in-house platform, Snapp. Saskia Steinacker, Chief Product Officer, Springer Nature said: "The expertise and judgement of reviewers are fundamental to peer review. As research grows in volume and complexity, we have an opportunity to explore how AI can responsibly support that expertise, helping reviewers focus their time where it matters most and on the questions that require specialist scientific judgement. For us, innovation and trust have to go hand in hand. That means testing what AI can add while being clear about where responsibility remains." The system is built using Google's open-source Agent Development Kit (ADK). It runs solely in Springer Nature's private, secure Gemini Enterprise platform. This means any content used to develop and test the AI peer reviewer assistant remains within Springer Nature's secure environment, ensuring author and reviewer confidentiality is maintained throughout. Seshu Ajjarapu, Senior Director, Applied AI, at Google DeepMind, said: "Unlocking scientific discovery requires a peer-review experience that is both rigorous and in sync with the pace of research. This partnership brings together Springer Nature's scientific publishing expertise and Google DeepMind's frontier research. Together, we are building a platform that relieves the strain of growing submission volumes while strictly upholding the editorial standards of the world's leading journals. It's a prime example of how AI can strengthen the foundational structures of modern science." The initiative reflects Springer Nature's broader commitment to using AI responsibly across research and publishing: human first, AI second. Further updates will be shared as testing progresses and development continues. More on the publishers' approach to AI use and guidance for its author, editor and research community can be found here. About Springer Nature. Springer Nature is one of the leading publishers of research in the world. Library Technology publish the largest number of journals and books and are a pioneer in open research. Through its leading brands, trusted for more than 180 years, Library Technology provide technology-enabled products, platforms and services that help researchers to uncover new ideas and share their discoveries, health professionals to stay at the forefront of medical science, and educators to advance learning. Library Technology is proud to be part of progress, working together with the communities Library Technology serve to share knowledge and bring greater understanding to the world. For more information, please visit about.springernature.com and follow Springer Nature. About Google DeepMind. Google DeepMind is a world-leading AI research lab with British heritage and an international team, committed to building AI responsibly, delivering scientific breakthroughs, and creating products that improve billions of lives. The team's breakthroughs over the last decade include AlphaGo - the first computer program to defeat a Go world champion, Transformers - neural networks that underpin all modern language models, AlphaFold - an AI model that can accurately predict the structure and interactions of proteins, DNA, RNA, ligands and more, and Gemini, a family of versatile AI models built from the ground up for multimodality, seamlessly combining and understanding text, code, images, audio and video. Release details. * Publication year - 2026 * Type of material - Press Release * Language - English * Date issued - October 27, 2026 * Publisher - Springer Nature * Company - Springer Nature * Permalink - https://librarytechnology.org/pr/33072/springer-nature-and-google-deepmind-collaborate-to-enhance-the-peer-review-experience

New open-access journal puts sustainable polymers at the center of Materials Science. 5 hours ago 9 PROTECT YOUR DNA WITH QUANTUM TECHNOLOGY Polymers are quietly the most successful materials story of the modern era, and the scientific community is now giving them a dedicated stage. Springer Nature has launched the Journal of Materials Science: Polymers, a new open-access title created to advance the science, engineering, and application of macromolecular materials at a moment when the field is undergoing its most profound transformation in decades. The inaugural editorial, written by Professor Maude Jimenez of University Lille and Professor Gregory C. Rutledge of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lays out an ambitious vision: a publication that treats polymers not merely as versatile workhorses of industry, but as materials that must now be designed with sustainability, circularity, and environmental responsibility built into their very molecular architecture. The case for a polymer-focused journal rests on the sheer ubiquity of these materials. Few classes of matter have permeated society so thoroughly. The packaging that preserves food, the textiles that clothe billions of people, the medical devices that sustain life in hospitals, and the membranes, coatings, and components that enable renewable energy technologies all depend on polymers. What makes them so adaptable is their macromolecular nature: long chains of repeating units whose chemistry, architecture, and organization can be tuned across an enormous range of structures and properties. That tunability is precisely why polymeric materials remain, as the editors emphasize, exceptionally fertile ground for discovery and innovation, a point echoed in landmark perspective articles by Hillmyer, by Abd-El-Aziz and Antonietti, and by Jayaraman and Klok that charted the grand challenges of the field. What has changed, according to the editorial, is the precision with which polymers can now be made and understood. Recent advances in synthesis allow chemists to control chain sequence, topology, and molecular weight distributions with a fidelity that was unthinkable only a few years ago. Characterization techniques now resolve structure from the Angstrom scale of individual bonds to the mesoscale of crystals, lamellae, and networks. Computation and simulation, increasingly augmented by machine learning, let researchers predict properties and screen candidate materials before a single experiment is run. Together, these tools mean that polymeric materials are no longer discovered so much as designed, engineered to specification for target functions ranging from drug delivery to structural composites to ion transport in batteries. Yet the editors are explicit that technical capability alone no longer defines success in polymer science. There is, they write, a growing recognition that the game has changed: polymers must be conceived and used with sustainability in mind. Renewability, recyclability, and reduced environmental impact have become design objectives in their own right, complementary rather than subordinate to the traditional goals of function and performance. This reframing is significant because it moves environmental considerations from the end of the development pipeline, where they were often treated as regulatory constraints, to the beginning, where molecular structure and processing routes are first chosen. A polymer conceived for circularity from the outset faces very different synthetic and design trade-offs than one retrofitted for recyclability after the fact. The new journal is not appearing in a vacuum. It has its roots in the Journal of Materials Science, a title with a long-standing record of excellence across the materials community, and it inherits the same standards of peer review, publication ethics, and reproduction quality. What it adds is a dedicated space for the opportunities and challenges that are unique to polymers, sitting at the convergence of performance and environmental responsibility. The stated scope is deliberately broad, spanning molecular design and self-assembly at one end and advanced manufacturing and end-of-life strategies at the other, a range that mirrors the life cycle thinking now demanded of the field as a whole. Among the topics the editors single out are macromolecules that are precisely engineered, networks that can heal or adapt in response to external stimuli, and coatings that bring new functionality to surfaces. Self-healing polymer networks, for instance, embed reversible bonds or dynamic crosslinks that allow a material to repair microdamage autonomously, extending service life and reducing waste. Stimuli-responsive systems change shape, stiffness, or permeability in response to heat, light, pH, or electric fields, opening doors to soft robotics, smart packaging, and adaptive medical implants. The journal also explicitly welcomes polymer-enabled systems designed for energy, health, and environmental applications, as well as innovative contributions on circularity and the environmental impact of polymers, from chemical recycling routes that depolymerize chains back to monomers to biodegradable architectures that break down safely after use. The publication model is as much a part of the vision as the science. The journal launches as a Gold Open Access title, meaning all articles are immediately and freely readable worldwide, a choice the editors tie directly to objectives of accessibility, transparency, and inclusivity in scientific communication. For a field whose supply chains, waste streams, and policy debates are inherently global, unrestricted access to research findings carries practical weight: a materials scientist in one country can build directly on the latest results from another without subscription barriers, and policymakers weighing plastics regulation can consult the primary literature itself. The first article, published on 20 November 2025 as Volume 1, article number 1 for the 2026 volume, is the editorial itself, available under a Creative Commons license. Just as striking is the editorial team's framing of community. Jimenez and Rutledge argue that a defining strength of polymers is their appeal across disciplines, from chemistry and physics to data science, engineering, and industrial processing, and they commit to building a journal that bridges those fields and communicates across national boundaries. That breadth is not cosmetic. Solving the plastics sustainability problem, for example, requires chemists to invent degradable backbones, process engineers to make those materials at scale, computational scientists to predict degradation pathways, and industrial partners to build collection and reprocessing infrastructure. A forum where those perspectives meet, rather than publishing past one another in siloed venues, is arguably the kind of infrastructure the field needs as much as any single laboratory breakthrough. The editors close with a direct invitation to scientists and engineers in academia and industry to submit their best work, noting that contributions will shape what the journal becomes. For researchers, the launch adds a venue where scientific originality is explicitly weighed alongside awareness of the broader context in which polymers are developed and applied, a criterion that signals how far the field's values have shifted. For everyone else, the significance is quieter but real: the materials that wrap its food, carry its data, and mend its bodies are entering an era in which their next generation will be judged not only by what they can do, but by what happens to them afterward. A journal built around that dual standard is a bet that polymer science can deliver both, and the community now has a new place to prove it. Subject of Research: Launch of a new open-access journal dedicated to polymer science and sustainable polymeric materials Article Title: Editorial: Welcome to the Journal of Materials Science: Polymers Article References: Jimenez, M., & Rutledge, G. C. (2025). Editorial: Welcome to the Journal of Materials Science: Polymers. Journal of Materials Science: Polymers, 1(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44493-025-00001-2 DOI: 10.1007/s44493-025-00001-2 Keywords: polymers, materials science, Springer Nature, open access, sustainability, recyclability, macromolecules, polymer synthesis, self-healing materials, circular economy, scientific publishing, polymer science Cite Scienmag News APA MLA Chicago Copy citation Download RIS * homepage * biology * new open-access journal puts sustainable polymers at the center of Materials Science.

Springer Nature announces new transformative agreement with University of Texas System. New York, NY - 17 September 2026. Springer Nature has signed a transformative agreement with the University of Texas System, expanding opportunities for researchers to publish their work open access while ensuring access to Springer Nature content. The agreement qualifies University of Texas System researchers to publish open access, articles that are accepted in the Springer Nature hybrid portfolio, helping their findings be discovered and built upon by the global research community. The deal deepens a 20-year relationship with the University of Texas System. The four-year agreement supports both read access to subscription content and open access publishing, and includes titles across Springer, Palgrave, and Adis brands. The agreement is expected to enable the open publication of nearly 900 articles per year. By removing the barrier of cost to eligible researchers, University of Texas-affiliated researchers will be able to increase the reach and vsibility of their work[1], advancing scientific discovery. Maria Lopes, Vice President, Institutional Sales for Springer Nature, said: "This agreement reflects the strong partnership between Springer Nature and the University of Texas, one founded on a commitment to publishing high-quality research. By making open access publishing easier and more accessible, researchers at the University of Texas will be able to share their findings and contribute to the scholarly discourse of their disciplines." Alexia Thompson-Young, Assistant Director of Scholarly Resources, University of Texas, stated: "We are pleased to partner with Springer Nature to give University of Texas researchers a greater opportunity to publish their work openly and increase the visibility of the research produced at our UT institutions. This agreement helps to ensure that the discoveries made by our researchers have a global impact." [1] When publishing gold OA, authors across all disciplines see almost seven times more downloads per research article than non-OA articles and 50% more citations on average than non-OA articles. Springer Nature. (2026). From access to impact: How open access shapes research reach, citations, and global visibility. About Springer Nature. Springer Nature is one of the leading publishers of research in the world. Library Technology publish the largest number of journals and books and are a pioneer in open research. Through its leading brands, trusted for more than 180 years, Library Technology provide technology-enabled products, platforms and services that help researchers to uncover new ideas and share their discoveries, health professionals to stay at the forefront of medical science, and educators to advance learning. Library Technology is proud to be a progress, working together with the communities Library Technology serve to share knowledge and bring greater understanding to the world. For more information, please visit about.springernature.com and follow Springer Nature. | Summary: | Springer Nature has signed a transformative agreement with the University of Texas System, expanding opportunities for researchers to publish their work open access while ensuring access to Springer Nature content. The agreement qualifies University of Texas System researchers to publish open access, articles that are accepted in the Springer Nature hybrid portfolio, helping their findings be discovered and built upon by the global research community. | | Publication Year: | 2026 | | Type of Material: | Press Release | | Language | English | | Date Issued: | September 22, 2026 | | Publisher: | Springer Nature | | Company: | Springer Nature | | Permalink: | https://librarytechnology.org/pr/32946/springer-nature-announces-new-transformative-agreement-with-university-of-texas-system | DocumentID: 32946 views: 154 Created: 2026-09-21 10:30:41 Last Modified: 2026-09-21 21:41:46.