On the morning of October 10, 2017, the Springer Nature and Nanjing Normal University Scientific Research Summit 2017, which is also the dialogue forum for researchers and Nature academic editors, was held at Jingwen Library. This conference invited experts including Nature Research director for Greater China Paul Evans, Springer Nature China science director Ed Gerstner, Scientific Reports director Anna Treadway to have face-to-face communication with NNU faculty and students. More than 100 NNU teachers and students along with members from other universities and colleges attended this conference.

Lixin Tian, Vice President of NNU, was present and made a speech. According to his speech, in the process of “Double First Class” university construction, which is national construction plan of world-class universities and first-class disciplines, NNU should strengthen communication with related important international organizations and institutions, and promote the internationalization of NNU in every respect by establishing normalized platforms for international communication and cooperation. The meeting will help authors in NNU have deeper understanding about Springer Nature. It will also expand communication channels between researchers and journal editors, and improve academic impacts of scholars and timeliness of publishing scientific achievements.

In the summit, Paul Evans and Ed Gerstner gave their speeches which separately are entitled “Nature Research—More Than Just Great Science Journals” and “Making Your Research Count”. They introduced Nature Index as well as rankings of worldwide and Asian scientific research institutions in Nature Index. Moreover, they gave a brief picture of Open Access, pointing out that scientific journals will develop  with open access, open network and open research making open data and open research become a growing trend, and analyzing the current opportunities and challenges for this developing pattern. They also mentioned how Springer Nature facilitates scientists to share research paper or even research data with a wider range of readers as a world-renowned publisher. To people who want to publish their articles in Nature journals, the experts gave them some experience concerning research paper submission, and told them how to make their research work achieve the most possible coverage.

Mr. Gerstner introduced the fundamental procedures and regular principles adopted by the journal to deal with submitted articles. He also explained patiently and clearly how to choose a proper topic and master writing skills, like authors should organize and express the content of paper from the views of readers. Then he concluded some issues and common mistakes that authors should pay attention to while submitting and publishing paper to Nature journals. After their speeches, Evans, Gerstner and Treadway answered questions from faculty and students and had further explanations to relative issues.

To make it more interactive and target-focused, this activity also invited over 30 authors of NNU to participate in a small meeting and exchange ideas with Springer Nature experts. Four NNU teachers including Liming Chen, Jiandong Zhu, Jingran Zhang and Lin Xu were invited to speak at the meeting about their scientific work. Later, Springer Nature experts thoroughly discussed related contents with them.