Springer Nature

• 1. Introduction

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  Springer Nature is a German-British academic publishing company whose name carries two centuries of family history. Its Springer half traces back to a printing house Julius Springer started in Berlin. Generations later, his grandson Bernhard Springer opened a publishing house of his own in New York. The company that carries their name today did not exist until several separate publishers merged into one in 2015. That merger pulled together century-old journals, familiar brand names, and years of retractions, lawsuits and public disputes over what science publishing should look like. How did a Berlin print shop and a New York publisher end up inside the same modern company? What has that company had to defend since?

• 2. Two Centuries Of Print

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  Julius Springer founded his Berlin printing business in 1842, decades before either Nature or Macmillan existed in their modern form. The journal Nature itself dates back to 1869, when Nature Publishing Group began publishing it. Macmillan Education traces its roots to Macmillan Publishers, founded in 1843. In 1950, Julius Springer's grandson Bernhard Springer founded his own company, Springer Publishing, in New York. Today, those lineages operate under Springer Nature's brand names, including Nature, Springer.com, BioMed Central, Scientific American, Heinrich Vogel Verlag and SciGraph.

• 3. The 2015 Merger

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  On the 15th of January 2015, plans for a merger between two publishing giants were first announced. Holtzbrinck Publishing Group held Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan and Macmillan Education. BC Partners held Springer Science+Business Media. Holtzbrinck ended up holding a 53 percent majority stake once the deal closed in May 2015. Springer Nature tried to go public in May 2018, and again in autumn 2020. Both attempts to list the company publicly collapsed amid poor market conditions. In 2021, Springer Nature added Atlantis Press to its portfolio, an open-access publisher that had launched in Paris back in 2006. Atlantis Press focused on scientific, technical and medical content, along with conference proceedings. Those two failed listings meant Springer Nature would keep answering to its private owners, rather than public shareholders, in the years that followed.

• 4. Changing Leadership

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  Derk Haank had already led Springer Science+Business Media before the merger, and he became the first chief executive of Springer Nature. Haank retired at the end of 2017. Daniel Ropers, who had co-founded and long led bol.com, took over as chief executive next. In September 2019, Frank Vrancken Peeters replaced Ropers as chief executive. Vrancken Peeters inherited a company that was being pushed, beyond questions of ownership, to publish more about how it actually operates.

• 5. Policies And Pledges

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  Springer Nature publishes a Modern Slavery Act statement, a tax strategy, and a gender pay gap report covering its UK operations. The company has signed the SDG Publishers Compact, a pledge tied to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in publishing. It became carbon neutral in 2020, and it has since grouped its output into 17 hubs tied to the SDGs. In 2014, Springer Nature launched the Nature Portfolio series of themed online journals. It later added titles such as Nature Climate Change, Nature Energy, Nature Sustainability, Nature Food, Nature Human Behaviour and Nature Water. Nature Cities followed in 2024. Among 100 journals rated by the SDG Impact Intensity system, only six earned the top Five Wheel score. Springer's title Environment, Development, and Sustainability was one of the six. The system based its ratings on data from 2016-2020, measuring how closely each journal's content matched the Sustainable Development Goals. That same roster included Nature Human Behaviour, a title that would later become a flashpoint over what Springer Nature's journals should weigh when judging research.

• 6. Censorship And Retractions

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  In 2017, Springer removed access to hundreds of articles for readers in China. The blocked material touched on Tibet, Taiwan, Chinese politics, and human rights concerns. In 2019, the company retracted a paper in its journal BMC Emergency Medicine. The peer-review process was so flawed that a herpetologist, an expert in reptiles and amphibians, could have caught the problem. In July 2020, Springer Nature retracted a paper in the journal Society. The retraction came after complaints that the review process was flawed and that the article itself was racist. In August 2020, the company was reported to have rejected an article by a Taiwanese doctor. The rejection reportedly came at the request of co-publisher Wenzhou Medical University. The stated reason was that the word China had not been placed after the word Taiwan. In November 2021, the publisher pulled 44 papers judged to be nonsense from the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, citing a breakdown in peer review. In August 2023, following a formal review, the company withdrew a paper asserting that no evidence supported a global climate crisis. These retractions and access restrictions were not the last disputes to reach Springer Nature's pages; some grew into open letters and lawsuits instead of retractions.

• 7. A Class-action Lawsuit

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  In September 2024, Lucina Uddin, a neuroscience professor at UCLA, sued Springer Nature and five other academic journal publishers. The suit was filed as a proposed class action. Uddin's suit claims the publishers struck an unspoken agreement to avoid competing for the same manuscripts, in violation of antitrust law. It also accused the publishers of refusing to pay scholars for reviewing manuscripts on the journals' behalf. That lawsuit challenged how Springer Nature and its rivals treat unpaid reviewers; a dispute the following year would challenge how its journals treat unpopular ideas.

• 8. A Boycott Letter

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  In October 2025, Anna Krylov, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California, published an open letter calling for a boycott of Nature journals. Krylov argued that Springer Nature had drifted away from its scientific mission toward what she called a "social justice agenda." She criticized Nature Reviews Psychology for pushing scholars toward what she termed citation justice, favoring authors from certain identity groups. She also criticized Nature Human Behaviour, which had published editorial guidance saying it would factor potential social harm into decisions on research submissions. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins publicly backed the letter. Springer Nature's spokesperson pushed back, saying citation diversity statements are voluntary and play no role in how manuscripts are judged. That response left Krylov's complaint about editorial priorities open for other publishers, and other readers, to weigh for themselves.