| Founded | 1842 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Julius Springer |
| Country of origin | Germany |
| Headquarters location | Berlin, Heidelberg |
| Nonfiction topics | science, technology, medicine, business, transport and architecture |
| Official website | www.springer.com |
Springer Science+Business Media or Springer is a global publishing company which publishes books, e-books and peer-reviewed journals in science, technical and medical (STM) publishing. Springer also hosts a number of scientific databases, including SpringerLink, SpringerProtocols, and SpringerImages. Book publications include major reference works, textbooks, monographs and book series; more than 37,000 titles are available as e-books in 13 subject collections.[1] Within STM, Springer is the largest book publisher and second-largest journal publisher worldwide (the largest being Elsevier), with over 60 publishing houses, more than 5,000 employees and around 2,000 journals and 6,500 new books published each year.[2] Springer has major offices in Berlin, Heidelberg, Dordrecht, and New York City.
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Julius Springer founded Springer-Verlag in Berlin in 1842.[3][4] In 1964, Springer expanded its business internationally, opening an office in New York. Offices in Tokyo, Paris, Milan, Hong Kong, and Delhi soon followed.
The academic publishing company BertelsmannSpringer was formed after Bertelsmann bought a majority stake in Springer-Verlag in 1999.[3][5] The British investment groups Cinven and Candover bought BertelsmannSpringer from Bertelsmann in 2003.[5] They merged the company in 2004 with the Dutch publisher Kluwer Academic Publishers which they bought from Wolters Kluwer in 2002,[6] to form Springer Science+Business Media.
In 2009, Cinven and Candover sold Springer to two private equity firms, EQT Partners and Government of Singapore Investment Corporation. The closing of the sale was confirmed in February 2010 after the competition authorities in the USA and in Europe approved the transfer.
Springer provides its electronic book and journal content on its SpringerLink site, which launched in 1996. SpringerLink is operated by MetaPress, a division of EBSCO Industries.[7]
SpringerProtocols is home to a collection of protocols, recipes which provide step-by-step instructions for conducting experiments in research labs.
SpringerImages[8] was launched in 2008 and offers a collection of currently 1.8 million images spanning science, technology, and medicine.
SpringerMaterials[9] was launched in 2009 and is a platform for accessing the Landolt-Börnstein database, the world's largest and most comprehensive source of research and information on materials and their properties.
AuthorMapper[10] is a free online tool for visualizing scientific research that enables document discovery based on author locations and geographic maps. The tool helps users explore patterns in scientific research, identify literature trends, discover collaborative relationships, and locate experts in several scientific/medical fields.
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 license or in the traditional restricted license model.[11] 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.[12]
See Category:Springer academic journals.