Publisher’s guide for Client-supplied Clinical Content

You know your brand, your data and your messages — we know our audiences. Supplied clinical content brings the two together, allowing you to place your research and results in front of leading clinicians. The benefits of supplied content are:

• Increased awareness of your work, research, products and brands
• Increased consideration from leading clinicians, in a speciality of your choice
• Convenience and ROI to use or adapt content already created and approved

This guide will help you optimize your content to best reach and engage Springer Nature’s clinical audiences, with an article hosted on Springer Nature Link.

Quick reference checklist

When submitting, please ensure the following. Failure to supply all materials or to comply with these requirements will delay your project and potentially incur additional charges (see PROCESS and ARTICLE SPECIFICS sections below for details).

• Final article in Word doc with a maximum word count of 1,500 and no more than 20 references
  1. Article should be copy edited and approved by medical-legal review (MLR)
  2. Not all editorial elements can be replicated on our pages – layout guidance here
• Image files, maximum of 4, provided separately as jpg or png (email attachments are fine)
  1. Ensure each image has a caption, credit and alt text
  2. A video file needs a YouTube embed code and counts as one image
• Client logo(s) and a click-through URL for each logo
• Traffic driver banners (leaderboard and MPU; 1 roadblock MPU if desired), specs here
  

General principles

Springer Nature Link is a scholarly site where timely, data-driven research is clearly and accurately presented. Supplied content should reflect these principles.

However, supplied content should not resemble a journal article; Springer Nature Custom Media editors will not accept any article that is, or could be mistake for, either a primary research paper or a review article.

Clinical supplied content can discuss licensed medicines and medical devices, with unembellished claims supported by the peer-reviewed literature, or content focused on clinician education that discusses biological pathways, mechanisms of action or disease awareness.

All partners must certify that their content has been passed by MLR as suitable for the audiences and geographies targeted.

All supplied content will be reviewed by our custom editorial team, and acceptance is at Springer Nature’s sole discretion.

Process

We aim to make the process of accepting clinical content as painless as possible. Our default workflow takes 72 hours from submission to publication and includes one review round that is intended for our partner to check for formatting errors. Any more reviews requested after this will incur charges and restart the timeline.

• Partner submits finalized article, images, logo and banners that they certify have been approved by MLR
• Our custom media team will review the content to ensure it meets both our guidelines and relevant advertising regulations (48-hour turnaround)
  1. If the content is not accepted, we will return it with required amendments (using track-changes) and/or detailed feedback around how to fix it
• Once content is accepted, we will deliver a web preview link in 12 business hours
• Partner has 12 business hours to review and check that no formatting errors have been introduced in preparing the page

Any subsequent changes requested that are not error corrections will incur charges of $1,000 per round.

Article specifics

Submissions should be in English, in text form, and can contain up to 4 images (including photos, videos, illustrations, charts). The maximum length for an article is 1500 words, excluding prescribing and safety information and references.

A maximum of 20 references can be added to the article. Any more are charged at $500 per 5 extra refs. Note that the references will always appear at the very end of an article — they cannot be moved earlier.

Owing to the limitations of our platform, we cannot use different header levels, change the font size or add a box around text. Alternative options are to use bold or italic styling, which can be combined with caps or small caps.

If required, a self-certified ‘gate’ can be added to intercept non-HCP readers.

Other notes

• Content cannot include unpublished results or make claims not substantiated by the peer-reviewed literature
• Content should not describe benefits of compounds still in clinical trials and not yet authorized
• Content should not include footnotes (other than formal references)
• Content should not be reliant on bespoke designs (including boxed text or sidebars) or decorative backgrounds
• If a job code is needed in the article, ensure it is in the main body of the text and not just in the header or footer
• Ensure all URLs are live, including those that link to previously published clinical content on Springer Nature Link

Images/videos

Powerful images drive reader interest. Every article is recommended to include at least one image, and a maximum of 4. All images must be submitted with a caption and credit information to sit underneath. Our partners must have rights to the images they submit.

For the lead position, seek an image that is eye-catching, science-related and not too detailed; avoid headshots, buildings, product images or technical charts and figures. For secondary images, most images are acceptable apart from logos, mascots, cartoons or org charts.

Graphs or other data-oriented images should also include a title and relevant additional information within the image itself. While we can include tables, they do not always display well on our site, so consider creating an image of your table to ensure it looks good and to save production time.

Video embeds are counted towards the number of images within an article. We cannot host video files; we can only embed videos hosted on Youtube.

Each additional image/video over 4 will cost $500.

Labelling 

Supplied content hosted on Springer Nature link will:

• Be clearly labelled with ‘PARTNER CONTENT | Partner retains sole responsibility for the content of this article’, as will any related marketing.
• Display the logo of the partner organization (max 3 logos) in a clear and transparent fashion, labelled ‘Produced by’.
• If branded/promotional content, also have a self-certified gating page to prevent non-HCP readers accessing the article, and ‘For Healthcare Professionals Only’ text added at the top.

Supplied clinical content will not carry author by-lines at the top, but can have authors with affiliations listed at the end of the article.

Reporting and performance

End of campaign report delivered by PDF.

There is no benchmarking or guarantees of page views owing to the variability across content and promotion channels.

Marketing packages are available, please consult your sales rep.