Business as (un)usual

You may have seen the news today, that the proposed merger between Digital Science’s parent company, Macmillan Science & Education, and Springer Business Media has gained all the necessary regulatory approvals, and that the two businesses have now formally merged to form a new company, called Springer Nature.

As we said in January, Digital Science will not join its sister companies in the new joint venture but will remain wholly owned by Macmillan’s parent company, Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.  So today is an exciting day for us too, as we celebrate our graduation from being a technology division of Macmillan to becoming an independent Holtzbrinck company.

We are in good company. Holtzbrinck is a global media business with a long and successful history of investing in a wide range of technology and software businesses.  Holtzbrinck Ventures and Holtzbrinck Digital, Information & Services incubate and support companies across the globe in the areas of B2B software, online consumer tech and software as services.

Whilst the organisation around us has changed, Digital Science itself will continue on the same mission.  We still invest and work to deliver technology that makes the lives of researchers more productive and fulfilling.  As technological progress proceeds apace, we have an unprecedented opportunity to better support the flow of information at every step of the research process.  This is not as esoteric as it may sound: providing better tools for research helps in turn to create new knowledge and wealth, and ultimately improves the quality of life for us all.

Collaborating with customers and other members of the research community around the world, we will continue as agents of change in science and publishing.  We will also keep – indeed enhance – our autonomy, agility and independence of spirit.  But though we are often described as an unconventional company, we serve and collaborate with a range of long-established organisations and institutions, from journal publishers and research-driven businesses to ancient universities and charitable funders.  It is this fertile combination – of the virtual and the physical, the digital and the analogue, the new and the established – that will provide us with better ways of doing research, and enable the new discoveries that our society so urgently needs.

If you have any questions about what we do, please do get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.