Springer Nature reviews

Nature (the product and the company) has come off very badly in the recent merger. Staff have been voting with their feet, and an exodus of good people has left a tattered patchwork of projects in various stages of death, killed off by decree from on-high, regardless of how successful they were. The remaining ex-Nature staff have been ordered to "adapt to change" and choose new projects and teams, but any attempt at doing so is rebuffed by the ex-Springer staff who say they aren't needed. Very strong blame culture emanating from management, who are experts at dodging responsibility for the decisions that they make (or did they? Maybe somebody else made them!) and holding "Town Hall" meetings to tell everyone "none of this is my fault!" Nature/Macmillan used to be well-known for transparency and openness, at the organisational level and at the product level. That's all being dumped down the drain now with silly top-down deadlines being imposed, technical decisions being made without involving technical staff, and the abandonment of open source and web/document standards in favour of proprietary, closed-box systems.

Since the two companies merged there has been poor management and communication within the technology department. Management are not talking to their staff correctly and in a lot of cases it seems each other as there are mixed messages coming from management. This has a huge affect on the teams when they insist on top down decisions rather than working with the teams. An unhealthy atmosphere has been created of ex-nature and ex-springer that has in part been created by management playing the two companies technology stacks against each other rather than working together to create solutions. The choice of technology stacks has also been decided at the top with poor communication so the direction is constantly shifting. Then when there are shifts within the approach or the overly optimistic deadlines are questioned no one will take responsibility for them. Nature had a very strong team within the technology department who really understood the needs of the business, unfortunately all these people are now leaving or have already left as they have been undervalued within the department.