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Springer Science+Business Media, commonly known as Springer, is a German multinational
publishing Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...
company of books,
e-book An ebook (short for electronic book), also known as an e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Alt ...
s and peer-reviewed journals in science, humanities, technical and medical (STM) publishing. Originally founded in 1842 in
Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...
, it expanded internationally in the 1960s, and through mergers in the 1990s and a sale to venture capitalists it fused with
Wolters 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 ...
and eventually became part of
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 Macm ...
in 2015. Springer has major offices in Berlin,
Heidelberg Heidelberg (; Palatine German language, Palatine German: ''Heidlberg'') is a city in the States of Germany, German state of Baden-Württemberg, situated on the river Neckar in south-west Germany. As of the 2016 census, its population was 159,914 ...
,
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 ...
, and
New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
.


History

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 Spr ...
founded Springer-Verlag in Berlin in 1842 and his son Ferdinand Springer grew it from a small firm of 4 employees into Germany's then second largest academic publisher with 65 staff in 1872.Chronology
". Springer Science+Business Media.
In 1964, Springer expanded its business internationally, opening an office in New York City. Offices in Tokyo, Paris, Milan, Hong Kong, and Delhi soon followed. In 1999, the academic publishing company BertelsmannSpringer was formed after media and entertainment company
Bertelsmann Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA () is a German private multinational conglomerate corporation based in Gütersloh, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is one of the world's largest media conglomerates, and is also active in the service sector and ...
bought a majority stake in Springer-Verlag. In 2003, the British investment groups
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 bought BertelsmannSpringer from Bertelsmann .Poynder, Richard.
BertelsmannSpringer is Sold to Private Equity Firms
. ''Information Today''. May 27, 2003.
They merged the company in 2004 with the
Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...
publisher Kluwer Academic Publishers which they bought from
Wolters 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 ...
in 2002, to form Springer Science+Business Media. In 2006, Springer acquired Humana Press. Springer acquired the open-access publisher
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 ...
in October 2008 for an undisclosed amount. In 2009, Cinven and Candover sold Springer to two private equity firms,
EQT Partners EQT AB Group is a global investment organization founded in 1994. Its funds invest in private equity, infrastructure, real estate, growth equity, and venture capital in Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific. , EQT's assets under management ...
and
Government of Singapore Investment Corporation GIC Private Limited is a sovereign wealth fund in Singapore that manages its foreign reserves. Established by the Government of Singapore in 1981 as the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, its mission is to preserve and enhance the ...
, confirmed in February 2010 after the competition authorities in the US and in Europe approved the transfer. In 2011, Springer acquired Pharma Marketing and Publishing Services (MPS) from Wolters Kluwer. In 2013, the London-based private equity firm
BC Partners BC Partners 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 all ...
acquired a majority stake in Springer from EQT and GIC for $4.4 billion. In January 2015,
Holtzbrinck Publishing Group Holtzbrinck Publishing Group () is a privately held German company based in Stuttgart which owns publishing companies worldwide. Through Macmillan Publishers, it is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies. In 2015, it merged ...
/
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 scie ...
and Springer Science+Business Media announced a merger. in May 2015 they concluded the transaction and formed a new joint venture company,
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 Macm ...
with Holtzbrinck in the majority 53% share and
BC Partners BC Partners 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 all ...
retaining 47% interest in the company.


Products

In 1996, Springer launched electronic book and journal content on its SpringerLink site. SpringerImages was launched in 2008. In 2009, SpringerMaterials, a platform for accessing the Landolt-Börnstein database of research and information on materials and their properties, was launched. AuthorMapper is a free online tool for visualizing scientific research that enables document discovery based on author locations and geographic maps, helping users explore patterns in scientific research, identify literature trends, discover collaborative relationships, and locate experts in several scientific/medical fields.
Springer Protocols ''Springer Protocols'' was a database of life sciences protocols published by Springer Science+Business Media. It replaced ''BioMed Protocols'', a Humana Press database, in January 2008, and was deactivated on 25 July 2018. The protocols were then ...
contained a collection of laboratory protocols, recipes that provide step-by-step instructions for conducting experiments, which in 2018 was made available in SpringerLink instead. As of 2014 Springer hosts a number of scientific databases, including SpringerLink, and SpringerImages.


Open access

Springer is a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. For some of its journals, Springer does not require its authors to transfer their copyrights, and allows them to decide whether their articles are published under an
open-access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
license or in the traditional restricted licence model. While open-access publishing typically requires the author to pay a fee for copyright retention, this fee is sometimes covered by a third party. For example, a national institution in Poland allows authors to publish in open-access journals without incurring any personal cost but using public funds.


Controversies

In 1938, Springer-Verlag insisted that the journal
Zentralblatt MATH zbMATH Open, formerly Zentralblatt MATH, is a major reviewing service providing reviews and abstracts for articles in pure and applied mathematics, produced by the Berlin office of FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastruct ...
adhere to
Nazi Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...
principles.
Tullio Levi-Civita Tullio Levi-Civita, (, ; 29 March 1873 – 29 December 1941) was an Italian mathematician, most famous for his work on absolute differential calculus (tensor calculus) and its applications to the theory of relativity, but who also made signific ...
, who was Jewish, was forced from the editorial board, and
Otto Neugebauer Otto Eduard Neugebauer (May 26, 1899 – February 19, 1990) was an Austrian-American mathematician and historian of science who became known for his research on the history of astronomy and the other exact sciences as they were practiced in anti ...
resigned in protest along with most of the rest of the board. In 2014, it was revealed that 16 papers in conference proceedings published by Springer had been computer-generated using
SCIgen SCIgen is a paper generator that uses context-free grammar to randomly generate nonsense in the form of computer science research papers. Its original data source was a collection of computer science papers downloaded from CiteSeer. All elem ...
. Springer subsequently retracted all papers from these proceedings.
IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operat ...
had removed more than 100 fake papers from its conference proceedings. In 2015, Springer retracted 64 papers from 10 of its journals it had published after a fraudulent
peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...
process was uncovered.


Manipulation of bibliometrics

According to Goodhart's law and concerned academics like the signatories of the
San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) intends to halt the practice of correlating the journal impact factor to the merits of a specific scientist's contributions. Also according to this statement, this practice creates bias ...
, commercial academic publishers benefit from manipulation of
bibliometrics Bibliometrics is the use of statistical methods to analyse books, articles and other publications, especially in regard with scientific contents. Bibliometric methods are frequently used in the field of library and information science. Bibliom ...
and scientometrics like the
journal impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as in ...
, which is often used as
proxy Proxy may refer to: * Proxy or agent (law), a substitute authorized to act for another entity or a document which authorizes the agent so to act * Proxy (climate), a measured variable used to infer the value of a variable of interest in climate ...
of
prestige Prestige refers to a good reputation or high esteem; in earlier usage, ''prestige'' meant "showiness". (19th c.) Prestige may also refer to: Arts, entertainment and media Films * ''Prestige'' (film), a 1932 American film directed by Tay Garnet ...
and can influence revenues, including public subsidies in the form of subscriptions and free work from academics. Seven Springer Nature journals, which exhibited unusual levels of
self-citation Coercive citation is an academic publishing practice in which an editor of a scientific or academic journal forces an author to add spurious citations to an article before the journal will agree to publish it. This is done to inflate the journal' ...
, had their
journal impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as in ...
of 2019 suspended from ''
Journal Citation Reports ''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publicationby Clarivate Analytics (previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters). It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science-Core Collect ...
'' in 2020, a sanction which hit 34 journals in total.


Selected imprints

*Adis International *
Apress 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 Macm ...
*
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 ...
**
Chemistry Central Chemistry Central was a scientific publisher specializing in open access publications in chemistry. It was established on August 22, 2006 and was operated by BioMed Central. Along with BioMed Central and the now-defunct PhysMath Central, Chemist ...
(defunct) **
PhysMath Central PhysMath Central was an imprint of Springer Science+Business Media, publishing online open-access scientific journals in physics and mathematics and operated by BioMed Central. It was active from 2007 until 2011. Journals published were: * ''P ...
(defunct) *
Birkhäuser Verlag Birkhäuser was a Swiss publisher founded in 1879 by Emil Birkhäuser. It was acquired by Springer Science+Business Media in 1985. Today it is an imprint used by two companies in unrelated fields: * Springer continues to publish science (particu ...
*Current Medicine Group * Humana Press *Infochem *Kluwer Academic Publishers **
D. Reidel D. Reidel was an academic publishing company based in Dordrecht 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 t ...
(defunct) *Plenum Publishers *SpringerOpen *
Springer Gabler Springer Gabler (formerly Gabler Verlag) is a German publishing house in the fields of economy. It was founded in Wiesbaden in 1929 as ''Betriebswirtschaftlicher Verlag Doktor Theodor Gabler''. The program is focussed on management, marketing an ...
*Springer Praxis Books * (formerly (SAV)) * Springer Vieweg


Selected publications

*''
Encyclopaedia of Mathematics The ''Encyclopedia of Mathematics'' (also ''EOM'' and formerly ''Encyclopaedia of Mathematics'') is a large reference work in mathematics. Overview The 2002 version contains more than 8,000 entries covering most areas of mathematics at a graduat ...
'' *''
Ergebnisse der Mathematik und ihrer Grenzgebiete ''Ergebnisse der Mathematik und ihrer Grenzgebiete''/''A Series of Modern Surveys in Mathematics'' is a series of scholarly monographs published by Springer Science+Business Media. The title literally means "Results in mathematics and related area ...
'' (book series) *''
Graduate Texts in Mathematics Graduate Texts in Mathematics (GTM) (ISSN 0072-5285) is a series of graduate-level textbooks in mathematics published by Springer-Verlag. The books in this series, like the other Springer-Verlag mathematics series, are yellow books of a standard s ...
'' (book series) *'' Grothendieck's Séminaire de géométrie algébrique'' *''
The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology ''The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Springer Science+Business Media in 18 issues per year. It covers all aspects of advanced manufacturing technology, such as robotic ...
'' *''
Lecture Notes in Computer Science ''Lecture Notes in Computer Science'' is a series of computer science books published by Springer Science+Business Media since 1973. Overview The series contains proceedings, post-proceedings, monographs, and Festschrifts. In addition, tutorial ...
'' *'' Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics'' (book series) *''
Zentralblatt MATH zbMATH Open, formerly Zentralblatt MATH, is a major reviewing service providing reviews and abstracts for articles in pure and applied mathematics, produced by the Berlin office of FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastruct ...
'' *''
MRS Bulletin ''MRS Bulletin'' is published by the Materials Research Society in partnership with Springer Nature. It was established in 1974 as the ''MRS Newsletter''. There was a year gap in 1981, and then in 1982, it came back as ''MRS Bulletin''. The cur ...
''


See also

* *
List of publishers The following are lists of publishing companies. By language *List of English-language book publishing companies ** List of English-language literary presses ** List of English-language small presses * List of Romanian-language publishers *List o ...
*
Media concentration Concentration of media ownership (also known as media consolidation or media convergence) is a process whereby progressively fewer individuals or organizations control increasing shares of the mass media. Contemporary research demonstrates in ...


References


External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Springer Science and Business Media Academic publishing companies Pan-European media companies Computer book publishing companies Commercial digital libraries Publishing companies of Germany Publishing companies established in 1842 Companies disestablished in 2015 1842 establishments in Prussia Multinational companies headquartered in Germany Multinational publishing companies German digital libraries German companies established in 1842 German companies disestablished in 2015