Springer Nature


Springer Nature is a British German academic publishing company created by the May 2015 merger of Springer Science+Business Media and Holtzbrinck Publishing Group's Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, and Macmillan Education. The company made revenues of €1.72 billion in 2019.

History

Springer Nature was formed in 2015 by the merger of Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan and Macmillan Education with Springer Science+Business Media. 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.
The company originates from a number of journals and publishing houses, notably Springer-Verlag, which was founded in 1842 by Julius Springer in Berlin, Nature Publishing Group which publishes Nature since 1869, and Macmillan Education, which goes back to Macmillan Publishers founded in 1843.
After the merger, former Springer Science+Business Media CEO Derk Haank became CEO of Springer Nature. When he retired by the end of 2017, he was succeeded by Daniel Ropers, the co-founder and long-time CEO of bol.com.
In September 2019 Daniel Ropers was replaced by Frank Vrancken Peeters.
In 2017, the company agreed to block access to hundreds of articles on its Chinese site, cutting off access to articles on Tibet, Taiwan and China's political elite.
In 2018, Springer Nature reported a mean gender pay gap of 17.6 % in its UK workforce, while the median was 15.2 %.

Subsidiaries