Commissioning Editor - Locum

Commissioning Editor - Locum

Location: London

Closing date: 18th April 2025

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. Visit group.springernature.com and follow @SpringerNature / @SpringerNatureGroup.

Springer Nature Journals aim 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.

Responsibilities:

1. Overall responsibility for planning and implementing commissioning strategies on key journals.
2. Define and implement best practices across the Collections lifecycle.
3. Identify appropriate topics for Collections.
4. Ascertain and understand trends in market share at the level of specific topics.
5. Carry out strategic competitor analysis.
6. Build and leverage relationships with internal and external editorial communities.
7. Use a wide array of data analysis tools to ensure topic selection is data-driven.
8. Participate in the development of new technology aimed at solving complex topic modeling problems.
9. Manage Collections pipeline against ambitious publication targets.
10. 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.
11. Identify and engage with Guest Editors and potential authors by inviting them to edit a Collection or submit their research articles.
12. Orchestrate the training of Guest Editors.
13. 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.
14. Support the team of Managing Editors with overseeing the management of peer review for the Collections' pipeline.

1. Sound knowledge and keen interest in Science.
2. Familiarity with the Research Process and the Scientific community.
3. Previous commissioning experience within scholarly publishing highly desirable.

1. An excellent understanding of the research publishing landscape and how journals and journal publishers serve the research community.
2. Strong data analysis and reporting skills - ability to directly query data is desirable.
3. Practical awareness of the importance and key aspects of research ethics and open access publishing.
4. Excellent presentational skills.
5. Excellent communication skills - both written and verbal.
6. Good interpersonal skills and the ability to communicate effectively with a wide range of colleagues and stakeholders.
7. A creative mindset and the ability to bring energy, ideas and new approaches.
8. A strategic and commercial mindset, with experience in developing and implementing plans.
9. 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.

1. Bachelor's Degree, preferably in a STEM discipline.

1. A CV which should include a brief account of your accomplishments.
2. A cover letter explaining your interest in the post and relevant experience.