Springer

About Springer

Springer, formally Springer Science+Business Media, is a German publisher of scientific, technical and medical books and journals. Julius Springer founded Springer-Verlag in Berlin in 1842; the house expanded internationally in the 1960s and keeps major offices in Berlin, Heidelberg, Dordrecht and New York.^[1] It has been owned by Springer Nature since the May 2015 merger that created that group, in which Holtzbrinck Publishing Group holds the majority share.^[1][2] Its New York science trade imprint Copernicus published the softcover of Nicholas Humphrey's A History of the Mind on 18 June 1999, which Springer still lists and sells.^[3]

The publishing house changed hands repeatedly before it reached Springer Nature. Bertelsmann bought a majority of Springer-Verlag in 1999 and ran it as BertelsmannSpringer; the British investment groups Cinven and Candover bought that business from Bertelsmann in 2003 and merged it in 2004 with Kluwer Academic Publishers, which they had acquired from Wolters Kluwer in 2002, to form Springer Science+Business Media.^[1] Cinven and Candover sold the company in 2009 to EQT AB and the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, a transfer confirmed in February 2010 once the American and European competition authorities had approved it, and in June 2013 the London private equity firm BC Partners agreed to buy the majority stake from EQT and GIC for about €3.3 billion, reported as $4.4 billion.^[1][4] Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and BC Partners announced in January 2015 that Holtzbrinck's Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan and Macmillan Education would merge with Springer Science+Business Media; the transaction closed in May 2015 as Springer Nature, with Holtzbrinck holding 53 per cent and BC Partners 47 per cent.^[1][2] Springer Nature is a Kommanditgesellschaft auf Aktien traded in Frankfurt as SPG in the SDAX, and Holtzbrinck, the Stuttgart family group founded in 1948, carries it in the science division alongside Digital Science.^[2][5]

The German Wikipedia treats the Luxembourg holding company Springer Science+Business Media S.A. as wound up in 2015 by the merger with Nature Publishing Group, while the English article and Wikidata record the publisher continuing under Springer Nature ownership.^[6][1][7] Springer's imprints and subsidiaries include Apress, Birkhäuser, BioMed Central, Humana Press, Springer Gabler, Springer Vieweg, Springer VS and Springer Spektrum, and the group absorbed Plenum Publishers, D. Reidel and Baltzer Science Publishers through the Kluwer Academic Publishers line.^[1]