Commissioning Editor

About Springer Nature Group 

Springer Nature opens the doors to discovery for researchers, educators, clinicians and other professionals. Every day, around the globe, our imprints, books, journals, platforms and technology solutions reach millions of people. For over 180 years our brands and imprints have been a trusted source of knowledge to these communities and today, more than ever, we see it as our responsibility to ensure that fundamental knowledge can be found, verified, understood and used by our communities – enabling them to improve outcomes, make progress, and benefit the generations that follow.  

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 About the Brand
 

The Springer Nature Journals Group aims to support researchers in communicating and advancing discovery for a better world. We do this by providing a trusted environment in which researchers can quickly, easily and transparently share their discoveries, data and research stories. 

About the Role

The Collections Management and Acquisition Team is a division within the Publishing Performance & Intelligence group providing expertise and dedicated resources to support the growth of commissioned content across the SN Journal portfolio.  

The Commissioning Editor is responsible for attracting high-quality content into key Springer Nature journals via the creation of Topical Collections. Increasing commissioned content is an essential part of our strategy to grow our Springer Nature journal portfolios and as such appropriate topic identification is critical. The Commissioning Editor will work with our Editorial Board Members and with our data scientists and analysts to ensure topic selection benefits from being data driven. Similarly, identification of an appropriate Guest Editor is key to a Collection’s success; the Commissioning Editor will reach out to high-level active researchers and encourage them to engage in Topical Collections in Springer Nature journals either as an editor or an author. This is a rare opportunity to join and help shape a new and growing team at a pivotal time. 

Roles Responsibilities: 

• Overall responsibility for planning and implementing commissioning strategies on key journals 

• Define and implement best practices across the Collections lifecycle 

• Identify appropriate topics for Collections 

• Ascertain and understand trends in market share at the level of specific topics 

• Carry out strategic competitor analysis 

• Build and leverage relationships with internal and external editorial communities 

• Use a wide array of data analysis tools to ensure topic selection is data-driven 

• Participate in the development of new technology aimed at solving complex topic modeling problems 

• Manage Collections pipeline against ambitious publication targets 

• Partner with our journals’ editorial teams so that Collections strategy is congruent with journal development plans and is translated into a consistent flow of opening and closing Collections, whilst ensuring the editorial teams retain ownership of their journals’ content 

• Identify and engage with Guest Editors and potential authors by inviting them to edit a Collection or submit their research articles. 

• Orchestrate the training of Guest Editors 

• Engage with our Marketing teams to coordinate and improve the promotion of our Collections, and develop new ways to reach out to the external communities served by our journals 

• Support the team of Managing Editors with overseeing the management of peer review for the Collections’ pipeline 

Experience, Skills & Qualifications:

• Sound knowledge and keen interest in Science 

• Familiarity with the Research Process and the Scientific community 

• An excellent understanding of the research publishing landscape and how journals and journal publishers serve the research community. 

• Direct experience of managing a journal or journal portfolio is desirable 

• Strong data analysis and reporting skills – ability to directly query data is desirable 

• Practical awareness of the importance and key aspects of research ethics 

• Excellent presentational skills 

• Excellent communication skills – both written and verbal. 

• Good interpersonal skills and the ability to communicate effectively with a wide range of colleagues and stakeholders 

• A creative mindset and the ability to bring energy, ideas and new approaches 

• A strategic and commercial mindset, with experience in developing and implementing plans. 

• Ability to adapt quickly to change, juggle a varied workload under pressure and work quickly and efficiently on own initiative as well as part of a team 

• Experience in Tableau is desirable 

 
Bachelor's Degree, preferably in a STEM discipline 

This role will be based in our Pune office on a hybrid working basis.  

At Springer Nature, we’re committed to creating a great working environment which includes the benefits you receive, opportunities for you to develop your skills and ways to get to know your colleagues. Some of these include: 

• Support networks that focus on fostering dialogue around diversity, community building, advice and advocacy 

• Wellbeing initiatives to support in maintaining a healthy work life balance 

• 24 hour access to our learning and development platform LEAP and LinkedIn Learning to help develop your skills 

• A fantastic benefits package