Springer Nature or the Springer Nature Group
is a German-British
academic publishing
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes Research, academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or Thesis, theses. The part of academic written output that is n ...
company created by the May 2015 merger of
Springer Science+Business Media
Springer Science+Business Media, commonly known as Springer, is a German multinational publishing company of books, e-books and peer-reviewed journals in science, humanities, technical and medical (STM) publishing.
Originally founded in 1842 in ...
and
Holtzbrinck Publishing Group
Holtzbrinck Publishing Group () is a Privately held company, privately held German company headquartered in Stuttgart, that Holding company, owns publishing companies worldwide. Through Macmillan Publishers, it is one of the Big Five English-lan ...
's
Nature Publishing Group
Nature Portfolio (formerly known as Nature Publishing Group and Nature Research) is a division of the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature that publishes academic journals, magazines, online databases, and services in scien ...
,
Palgrave Macmillan
Palgrave Macmillan is a British academic and trade publishing company headquartered in the London Borough of Camden. Its programme includes textbooks, journals, monographs, professional and reference works in print and online. It maintains offi ...
, and
Macmillan Education
Macmillan Education is a publishing imprint and business which has been owned by various divisions and companies of the Macmillan publishing group and, more recently, the Springer Nature
Springer Nature or the Springer Nature Group is a Germa ...
.
History
The company originates from several journals and publishing houses, notably
Springer-Verlag
Springer Science+Business Media, commonly known as Springer, is a German multinational publishing company of books, e-books and peer-reviewed journals in science, humanities, technical and medical (STM) publishing.
Originally founded in 1842 in ...
, which was founded in 1842 by
Julius Springer
Julius Springer (10 May 1817 – 17 April 1877) was a German publisher who founded the academic publishing house Springer Science+Business Media (formerly known as Springer-Verlag).
Springer-Verlag
In 1842, Springer founded the retail bookshop Sp ...
in Berlin (the grandfather of Bernhard Springer who founded
Springer Publishing
Springer Publishing Company is an American publishing company of academic journals and books, focusing on the fields of nursing, gerontology, psychology, social work, counseling, public health, and rehabilitation (neuropsychology). It was estab ...
in 1950 in New York),
Nature Publishing Group
Nature Portfolio (formerly known as Nature Publishing Group and Nature Research) is a division of the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature that publishes academic journals, magazines, online databases, and services in scien ...
which has published ''
Nature'' since 1869, and
Macmillan Education
Macmillan Education is a publishing imprint and business which has been owned by various divisions and companies of the Macmillan publishing group and, more recently, the Springer Nature
Springer Nature or the Springer Nature Group is a Germa ...
, which goes back to
Macmillan Publishers
Macmillan Publishers (occasionally known as the Macmillan Group; formally Macmillan Publishers Ltd in the United Kingdom and Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC in the United States) is a British publishing company traditionally considered to be on ...
founded in 1843.
Springer Nature was formed in 2015 by the merger of Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, and Macmillan Education (held by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group) with Springer Science+Business Media (held by
BC Partners
BC Partners LLP is a British international investment firm with over $40 billion of assets under management across private equity, credit and real estate in Europe and North America. Its global headquarters are in London. The firm invests across ...
). Plans for the merger were first announced on 15 January 2015. The transaction was concluded in May 2015 with Holtzbrinck having the majority 53% share.
IPO attempts in May 2018 and Autumn 2020 were unfruitful due to unfavorable market conditions.
In 2021, Springer Nature acquired Atlantis Press, an
open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...
publisher founded in Paris in 2006, focusing on
scientific, technical, and medical
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally publis ...
(STM) content, and publication of
conference proceedings
In academia and librarianship, conference proceedings are a collection of academic papers published in the context of an academic conference or workshop. Conference proceedings typically contain the contributions made by researchers at the confer ...
.
Current company
After the merger, former Springer Science+Business Media
CEO
A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization.
CEOs find roles in variou ...
Derk Haank Derk may refer to:
* Derk (given name), a Dutch masculine given name
* Derk, Kohgiluyeh
* and Boyer-Ahmad, a village in Iran
See also
* Dərk
* Derk-Elsko
* Dirk (disambiguation)
* Durk
* DYRK
* Jaap-Derk
{{disambig ...
became CEO of Springer Nature. When he retired by the end of 2017, he was succeeded by
Daniel Ropers
Daniel commonly refers to:
* Daniel (given name), a masculine given name and a surname
* List of people named Daniel
* List of people with surname Daniel
* Daniel (biblical figure)
* Book of Daniel, a biblical apocalypse, "an account of the acti ...
, the co-founder and long-time CEO of
bol.com. In September 2019, Ropers was replaced by
Frank Vrancken Peeters
Frank, FRANK, or Franks may refer to:
People
* Frank (given name)
* Frank (surname)
* Franks (surname)
* Franks, a Germanic people in late Roman times
* Franks, a term in the Muslim world for all western Europeans, particularly during the Crus ...
.
The company is releasing several Policies & Reports, including a
Modern Slavery Act statement, a Tax strategy, and a
gender pay gap
The gender pay gap or gender wage gap is the average difference between the remuneration for men and women who are Employment, employed. Women are generally found to be paid less than men. There are two distinct measurements of the pay gap: non ...
report for Springer Nature's UK operations.
Springer Nature is a signatory of the
SDG Publishers Compact
The United Nations SDG Publishers Compact is a non-binding United Nations pact open to publishers, associations, booksellers and other organizations involved in the publishing industry, in support of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development ...
,
and has taken steps to support the achievement of the
Sustainable Development Goals
The ''2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development'', adopted by all United Nations (UN) members in 2015, created 17 world Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The aim of these global goals is "peace and prosperity for people and the planet" – wh ...
(SDGs) in the publishing industry.
These include becoming carbon neutral as of 2020,
organizing its publications into 17 SDG-related content hubs, and launching thematic journals such as ''Nature Climate Change'', ''Nature Energy'', ''Nature Sustainability'',
''Nature Food'', ''Nature Human Behaviour'', ''Nature Water'' and ''Nature Cities'' (appearing 2024). In 2014, the Nature Portfolio series of themed online journals was launched.
Springer's journal ''Environment, Development, and Sustainability'' was one of six out of 100 journals to receive the highest possible "Five Wheel" impact rating from the SDG Impact Intensity™ journal rating system, based on an analysis of data from 2016–2020 that assessed relevance to the
Sustainable Development Goals
The ''2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development'', adopted by all United Nations (UN) members in 2015, created 17 world Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The aim of these global goals is "peace and prosperity for people and the planet" – wh ...
(SDGs).
Brands
The following major brands belong to the group (see also Subsidiaries):
* ''
Nature
Nature is an inherent character or constitution, particularly of the Ecosphere (planetary), ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the Scientific law, laws, elements and phenomenon, phenomena of the physic ...
''
*
Springer.com
*
BioMed Central
BioMed Central (BMC) is a United Kingdom-based, for-profit scientific open access publisher that produces over 250 scientific journals. All its journals are published online only. BioMed Central describes itself as the first and largest open a ...
*
Scientific American
''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Pri ...
* Heinrich Vogel Verlag
*
SciGraph
SciGraph was a search engine tool developed by Springer Nature, the former URL was https://scigraph.springernature.com/explorer. The technology, which was considered a Linked Open Data (LOD) platform, collects information that covers the resear ...
Controversies
In 2017, the company agreed to block access to hundreds of articles on its Chinese site, cutting off access to articles related to Tibet, Taiwan, and China's political elite.
The company retracted a paper in 2019, in its journal ''BMC Emergency Medicine'' due to a dubious peer-review process (a herpetologist could have denied the publication of the paper).
In August 2020, Springer Nature was reported to have rejected the publication of an article at the behest of its co-publisher,
Wenzhou Medical University
Wenzhou Medical University (WMU); ), designated as a key university in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, is an higher education, institution of higher learning under the leadership of Zhejiang Provincial Government.
History
Wenzhou Medical University (WMU) i ...
, from a Taiwanese doctor because the word "China" was not placed after "Taiwan".
In July 2020, Springer Nature retracted a paper in the journal ''
Society
A society () is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. ...
'' due to a dubious review process and criticism regarding racism.
In November 2021, Springer Nature retracted 44 nonsense papers from the ''Arabian Journal of Geosciences'' after a lapse in the peer review process.
In August 2023, after an investigation, Springer Nature retracted a paper that claimed there is no evidence of a global climate crisis.
[
]
Lawsuits
In September 2024, Lucina Uddin, a neuroscience professor at UCLA
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the C ...
, sued Springer Nature along with five other academic journal
An academic journal (or scholarly journal or scientific journal) is a periodical publication in which Scholarly method, scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. They serve as permanent and transparent forums for the ...
publishers in a proposed class-action
A class action
A class action is a form of lawsuit.
Class Action may also refer to:
* ''Class Action'' (film), 1991, starring Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
* Class Action (band), a garage house band
* "Class Action" (''Teenage R ...
lawsuit, alleging that the publishers violated antitrust
Competition law is the field of law that promotes or seeks to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies. Competition law is implemented through public and private enforcement. It is also known as antitrust l ...
law by agreeing not to compete against each other for manuscripts and by denying scholars payment for peer review
Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (:wiktionary:peer#Etymology 2, peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the ...
services.
Subsidiaries
See also
* Publishing
Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...
* Scientific publication
Scientific literature encompasses a vast body of academic papers that spans various disciplines within the natural and social sciences. It primarily consists of academic papers that present original empirical research and theoretical co ...
References
External links
*
{{Authority control
Academic publishing companies
Multinational publishing companies
Publishing companies established in 2015
Holtzbrinck Publishing Group