Springer

From Eureka

Display of Springer publications.

Springer Science & Business Media is a conglomerate consisting of two main parts: STM Publishing (Science Technology & Medicine Publishing) and B2B Publishing (Business to Business Publishing). Sales totalled € 838 million in 2005 and about € 924 million in 2006.

STM publishes about 1,700 academic journals and about 5,500 new books each year in Berlin, Heidelberg, Dordrecht, Vienna, Paris, London, Milan, Moscow, New York, Boston, Norwell, Beijing, Tokyo and New Delhi. 90 percent of their publications are in English.

Springer merged with the mathematics publisher Kluwer in the Spring of 2004, having already acquired Birkhäuser^[1] in 1985.^[2] In October 2007, Springer acquired the Open Access publisher BioMed Central.^[3]

Springer practices journal bundling: its SpringerLink website sells access to a package of 1,250 journals and over 10,000 books online. With the complicity of Google Scholar, the SpringerLink website also practices cloaking, a technique where "what you see is not what you get" when using a search engine.

1 High prices
2 More information needed
3 Further links
4 References

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High prices

In October 2007, the Max Planck Society announced that it was terminating its contract with SpringerLink: ^[4]

The analysis of user statistics and comparisons with other important publishing houses had shown that Springer was charging twice the amount the MPG still considered justifiable for access to the journals, the Society declared. "And that 'justifiable' rate is still higher than comparable offers of other major publishing houses," a spokesman of the Max Planck Digital Library told heise online.^[5]

Several months later, the MPS and Springer came to an agreement:

The Max Planck Society and Springer have reached an agreement which allows the scientists working at the 78 Max Planck Institutes and research facilities across Germany access to all content on SpringerLink, and which also includes Open Choice(TM), Springer's open access scheme, for all researchers affiliated with a Max Planck Institute publishing in Springer's journals. Springer's Open Choice(TM) program offers full and immediate open access for articles that are accepted for publication after a process of rigorous peer-review.^[6]

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