Springer Nature, one of the leading international research publishers, is home to trusted brands including Springer, Nature Research, BioMed Central, Palgrave Macmillan and Scientific American. Springer Nature is also a leading educational and professional publisher, providing quality content through a range of innovative platforms, products and services.

The company numbers around 13,000 staff in over 50 countries. Springer Nature was formed in 2015 through the merger of Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, Macmillan Education and Springer Science+Business Media.

Analysis & Key Developments

Financial

Due to the merger and subsequent integration process between Springer and Nature publishing organizations, it must be noted that financials for 2015 cannot be compared meaningfully with 2016 or 2017 figures.

In May 2018, Springer Nature prepared a 3.2 billion EUR stock market flotation, yet cancelled the IPO at the last minute, citing market conditions.

Internal Organization

Daniel Ropers, previously CEO of the Dutch online book retail platform bol.com, took over as Springer Nature CEO on 1 October 2017.

The merger of Springer Science+Business Media with the majority of Macmillan Science and Education was completed in May 2015.

In 2017, Springer Nature launched 30 new journals including Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Ecology and Evolution,Communications Biology, and Economics of Disasters and Climate Change. They also launched Springer Nature Experiments, to make the world’s largest collection of experimental protocols and methods more easily usable when planning and running experiments, helping to improve research lab productivity.

Springer Nature published more than 90,000 open access articles in 2017. There were around 240 million downloads of fully open access articles on the BMC, nature.com and SpringerLink platforms.

The company expanded a range of research data support services, aimed at helping intuitions and funders to overcome some of the challenges that currently stand in the way of greater sharing of research data.

Launched under the Macmillan Education brand, its English Medium program offers curriculum materials for teachers, students and parents for whom English is a second language.

Digital

In 2017, Springer Nature introduced SciGraph, a Linked Open Data offering which aggregates data sources from Springer Nature and key partners from the scholarly domain to make important data to the research process—for example, from funders, research projects, conferences, affiliations and publications—more discoverable. The number of accessible data relationships has expanded from 130 million to more than one billion.

SN SharedIt, the content sharing initiative of Springer Nature for non-commercial use through free, shareable links was extended across the Springer Nature-owned portfolio in 2017. In its first year, SharedIt links were used to read Springer Nature articles more than 3.2 million times, by readers from more than 40,000 institutions.

Return to the full listing of the world's largest publishers.