Short answers, pulled from the story.
Springer Nature was formed in May 2015 through the merger of Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan and Macmillan Education with Springer Science+Business Media. Plans for the merger were first announced on the 15th of January 2015, and Holtzbrinck Publishing Group ended up holding a 53 percent majority stake.
Frank Vrancken Peeters has been chief executive of Springer Nature since September 2019, when he replaced Daniel Ropers. Ropers had succeeded Derk Haank, the company's first chief executive, who retired at the end of 2017.
Springer Nature retracted 44 papers judged to be nonsense from the Arabian Journal of Geosciences in November 2021, citing a breakdown in the peer review process.
In October 2025, chemistry professor Anna Krylov published an open letter accusing Springer Nature of abandoning its scientific mission for a social justice agenda. She criticized Nature Reviews Psychology for citation justice practices and Nature Human Behaviour for editorial guidance weighing potential social harm in research submissions.
In September 2024, UCLA neuroscience professor Lucina Uddin sued Springer Nature and five other academic publishers in a proposed class-action lawsuit. The suit alleged an antitrust agreement not to compete for manuscripts and a refusal to pay scholars for peer review.
No, Springer Nature attempted an initial public offering in May 2018 and again in autumn 2020, but both attempts failed due to unfavorable market conditions.