D. Reidel was an

academic publishing 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 pu ...

company based in

Dordrecht Dordrecht (), historically known in English as Dordt (still colloquially used in Dutch, ) or Dort, is a city and municipality in the Western Netherlands, located in the province of South Holland. It is the province's fifth-largest city after R ...

established in the 1960s which was independent until the 1990s.

History

Reidel was established in the 1960s, with a focus on publishing research in physics. Reidel himself had been trained under an ex-Elsevier manager, M. D. Frank, who considered third generation Dutch publishers like Reidel to be the "grandchildren" of the German publishing company,

Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft The (AVG, AVg, Aka, AV; English: Academic publishing company) in Leipzig was an important German academic publisher, which was founded in 1906. The original Jewish owners of the publishing house and key employees were expropriated during the t ...

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as ...

, where Frank himself was trained. "In the 1960s a mainly physics programme was established by D. Reidel Publishing Company in Dordrecht. Other players included Dr. W. Junk, P. Noordhoff and M. Nijhoff, who were all to become part of a group that began in the 1970s and which resulted in the establishment of Kluwer Academic Publishers. Publishers like Reidel, trained by Frank — who in turn had had his training at Aka — were termed by Frank 'grandchildren of Aka.'"Fredriksson, Einar H. (2001). "The Dutch publishing scene: Elsevier and North Holland". In Fredriksson, Einar H.,
A Century of Science Publishing: A Collection of Essays
', p. 71. In the 1990s Reidel joined with

Kluwer Wolters Kluwer N.V. () is a Dutch information services company. The company is headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands (Global) and Philadelphia, United States (corporate). Wolters Kluwer in its current form was founded in 1987 with a m ...

as Kluwer/Reidel, in 2003 being purchased by

Cinven Cinven is a global private equity firm founded in 1977, with offices in nine international locations in Guernsey, London, New York, Paris, Frankfurt, Milan, Luxembourg, Madrid, and Hong Kong that acquires Europe and United States based corporat ...

and Candover. In spring 2004, Cinven and Candover purchased Springer, merging the operations of all the publishers into one conglomerate,

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 ...

, now "the second largest commercial scholarly publisher in the world" after

Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as '' The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', ...

. Aka had been co-founded by Walter Jalowicz (who changed his name to Johnson and later worked for

Academic Press Academic Press (AP) is an academic book publisher founded in 1941. It was acquired by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1969. Reed Elsevier bought Harcourt in 2000, and Academic Press is now an imprint of Elsevier. Academic Press publishes referen ...

in New York) and his son-in-law K. Jacoby, together with the

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

(and spy)

Paul Rosbaud Paul Rosbaud (18 November 1896 – 28 January 1963), was a metallurgist and scientific adviser for Springer Verlag in Germany before and during World War II. He continued in science publishing after the war with Pergamon Press in Oxford, Engl ...

(later of Butterworth), and

chemist A chemist (from Greek ''chēm(ía)'' alchemy; replacing ''chymist'' from Medieval Latin ''alchemist'') is a scientist trained in the study of chemistry. Chemists study the composition of matter and its properties. Chemists carefully describe t ...

E. Proskauer (later vice-president of

John Wiley & Sons John Wiley & Sons, Inc., commonly known as Wiley (), is an American multinational publishing company founded in 1807 that focuses on academic publishing and instructional materials. The company produces books, journals, and encyclopedias, ...

References

External links

Aka Verlag
— official website of

Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft AKA GmbH The (AVG, AVg, Aka, AV; English: Academic publishing company) in Leipzig was an important German academic publisher, which was founded in 1906. The original Jewish owners of the publishing house and key employees were expropriated during the ...

Book publishing companies of the Netherlands Mass media in Dordrecht Defunct publishing companies of the Netherlands {{publishing-stub