Springer Science+Business Media
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 that 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, Springer Protocols, and SpringerImages. Book publications include major reference works, textbooks, monographs and book series; more than 88,000 titles are available as e-books in 18 subject collections. Within STM, Springer is[when?] the largest book publisher and second-largest journal publisher worldwide after Elsevier, with around 55 publishing houses, almost 6,200 employees and around 2,000 journals and 7,000 new books published each year. Springer has major offices in Berlin, Heidelberg, Dordrecht, and New York City.

History
Julius Springer founded Springer-Verlag in Berlin in 1842. 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. The British investment groups Cinven and Candover bought BertelsmannSpringer from Bertelsmann in 2003. They merged the company in 2004 with the Dutch publisher Kluwer Academic Publishers which they bought from Wolters Kluwer in 2002, 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 acquired the open-access publisher BioMed Central for an undisclosed amount.

In 2011, it acquired Pharma Marketing and Publishing Services from Wolters Kluwer.

Electronic products
Springer provides its electronic book and journal content on its SpringerLink site, which launched in 1996.

SpringerProtocols is home to a collection of protocols, recipes which provide step-by-step instructions for conducting experiments in research labs.

SpringerImages was launched in 2008 and offers a collection of currently 1.8 million images spanning science, technology, and medicine.

SpringerMaterials was launched in 2009 and is a platform for accessing the Landolt-Börnstein database of research and information on materials and their properties.

AuthorMapper 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.

Open access
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. 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 - but using public funds.

Selected imprints
Apress
BioMed Central
Chemistry Central
PhysMath Central (defunct)
Birkhäuser Verlag
Current Medicine Group
Humana Press
Infochem
Key Curriculum Press
Kluwer Academic Publishers
Plenum Publishers
Springer Asia
Springer France
Springer Italy
Springer India
Springer Japan
SpringerOpen
Springer Spektrum
Journals
See Category:Springer academic journals.
Selected publications
Encyclopaedia of Mathematics
Ergebnisse der Mathematik und ihrer Grenzgebiete (Book series)
Graduate Texts in Mathematics (Book series)
Grothendieck's Séminaire de géométrie algébrique
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Springer Series in Surface Sciences (Book series)
Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics (Book series)
Zentralblatt MATH