Springer Nature reviews

- Big company, so a lot of money is wasted, especially by having large teams who don't innovate, and are paralysed by the idea of innovating (the fallout from doing migration work for so many years). Work was unevenly distributed within & between teams, so sometimes developers sit around bored. Product managers sometimes scared to do big things, as they don't have full control of the product. - Not everyone in the business understood the value of IT, which also makes innovation very hard. Nature editors didn't always want to do things the digital way, as print was all they knew. Unfortunately they often have final say and the Digital department has to work very hard to convince them to do things that a newer company wouldn't even think twice about doing. - I felt like my exit interview was just formulaic, HR didn't seem to really care about my suggestions. - The organisation itself if very political and there isn't much room for progression. It is very much a "who you know" type of place. If you're not in with the right people, doesn't matter what you say or do.

Where to start. During my year, management consistently made choices that would damage the quality of our publications (price hikes, decreased copyediting, opaque communication with outsourced production). The number of books we had to acquire was so high that even manuscripts containing plagiarism couldn't be discounted for acquisition—and respect for copyright liability was low. Several senior editors in my group had coasted for >1 year—lying to authors about the status of their books to avoid commitments/conflicts—without meaningful oversight or intervention. If you care about the quality of the books you make (physical properties or intellectual content), do not work here.