Nature Publishing Group Climbs Onto Another Giant’s Shoulders

The journal Nature may tower over basic science but its parent, Macmillan Science and Education, was relatively small when stacked up against industry giants. All that changes with the Macmillan-Springer merger. ASCB photo Johnny Chang

Isaac Newton is famously said to have said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The Nature Publishing Group (NPG), which puts out Nature and its long line of brand extension sub-journals, along with such titles as Scientific American, is about to be lifted onto the broader shoulders of an even larger science publishing giant, Springer Science + Business. NPG is owned by Macmillan Science and Education, which is in turn owned by the privately held Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. Holtzbrinck will have a 53% share of the merged Macmillan-Springer company with BC Partners, a managing firm for big investment funds that owns Springer Science + Business holding the other 47%.

Despite the long shadow thrown by Nature and its other journals in basic science, Macmillan Science and Education is a pygmy in the scientific, medical, and technical publishing world with a mere 160 journals. Springer is actually number two, in terms of journal titles, with 2,987 behind number one Elsevier with 3,057. The Macmillan titles should move Macmillan-Springer into first place in the titles race. Unlike Science, which is published by the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science, Nature has always been a commercial venture, started in 1869 by the Scottish publisher Alexander Macmillan. The British branch of Macmillan was among the last major independent periodical publishers until 1999 when Holtzbrinck acquired the remaining family shares.

The deal between the London-based Macmillan and the Berlin-based Springer Science + Business is subject to the European equivalent of anti-trust approval but no dustup is expected. Interviewed by writer Dalmeet Singh Chawla in Science, Richard Anderson, a library dean at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, thought the merger between two massive private equity firms showed a lowering of financial expectations for science and technical publishing as the partners are expected to cash out soon by taking the merged Macmillan-Springer public. Anderson said that, “Publishers are fielding more and more submissions and chasing smaller and smaller budgets while also dealing with an increasingly complex scholarly communication environment. It’s a very tough position to be in.”