# Springer Nature

Springer Nature or the Springer Nature Group is a German–British 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.

## History

The company originates from several journals and publishing houses, notably Springer-Verlag, which was founded in 1842 by Julius Springer in Berlin (the grandfather of Bernhard Springer who founded Springer Publishing in 1950 in New York), Nature Publishing Group which has published Nature since 1869, and Macmillan Education, which goes back to Macmillan Publishers 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). 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 publisher founded in Paris in 2006, focusing on scientific, technical, and medical (STM) content, and publication of conference proceedings.

## Current company

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, Ropers was replaced by Frank Vrancken Peeters.
The company is releasing several Policies & Reports, including a Modern Slavery Act statement, a Tax strategy, and a gender pay gap report for Springer Nature's UK operations.
Springer Nature is a signatory of the SDG Publishers Compact, and has taken steps to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (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 (SDGs).

### Brands

The following major brands belong to the group (see also Subsidiaries):
* Nature
* Springer.com
* BioMed Central
* Scientific American
* Heinrich Vogel Verlag
* SciGraph

## 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, 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 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, sued Springer Nature along with five other academic journal publishers in a proposed class-action lawsuit, alleging that the publishers violated antitrust law by agreeing not to compete against each other for manuscripts and by denying scholars payment for peer review services.

## Subsidiaries

* Adis International
* Apress
* Asser Press
* BioMed Central
* Bohn Stafleu van Loghum
* J. B. Metzler
* Macmillan Education
* Nature Research
* Palgrave Macmillan
* Scientific American
* Springer Healthcare
* Springer VS
* Springer Verlag
* Springer Gabler
* Springer Vieweg Verlag
* Springer Medizin
* Springer Pflege
* Springer Nature Technology and Publishing Solutions
* SciGraph