Interview Creating


Tell us a little about your background and qualifications?


I joined Springer Nature a year ago from bol.com, which I co-founded and led for 20 years. During my time there, the company developed from a small start-up to being the largest online retail platform for Dutch speaking consumers around the world, serving half the Dutch population with revenues of more than €2bn and delivering growth of 30 per cent per annum. So, you may well ask why I left to move


into academic publishing generally and to Springer Nature specifically? I think this can be summed up in one word – purpose! While I am and remain incredibly proud


of bol.com and what we achieved during my time there, at the end of the day making shopping easier is really about solving a first-world problem. Thinking about my new role, I do not think there is anything more important in the world than helping to create fundamental truth. The advancement of health, wealth and happiness is accelerated through the building and sharing of knowledge and central to this is the role that Springer Nature plays, which is why I am proud and excited to be its CEO. We are able to take this central role


because we are a leader in many fields. We are one of the largest STM publishers, home to the largest portfolio of English language journals, home to Nature, the group of journals publishing science of the highest significance, a world leader in academic book publishing by numbers, and undisputed leader in open access with one in three OA articles published globally published by Springer Nature. Springer Nature is also recognised


for its process excellence, most notably production, and its progressive approach to partnering, to deliver benefits to the


14 Research Information December 2018/January 2019


‘fundamental truth’


SpringerNature’s new CEO Daniel Ropers was keynote speaker at the STM Frankfurt event this month. Here, he outlines his early thoughts as a ‘newbie’ to scholarly communications


community across all elements of the research and publishing cycle. This made it an exciting company to come and join.


You’ve spent the majority of your working life in the retail sector. How will this inform your career in scholarly communications? At bol.com we scaled quickly to become the largest online retailer in the Netherlands, with revenues in excess of one billion euros and much of this success was down to an ability to change quickly and to do so again and again. Of course a contributory factor in being able to do this is that it was a start-up – and


“We must do everything we can to be as transparent as publishers as we can”


by definition people who join start-ups are not risk averse and more open to change – but I feel that the lessons I learned there hold true for other organisations and are lessons that I am taking into Springer Nature, a much larger (13,000 people) and more complex (operating in over 50 countries) organisation. This is an organisation with an urgent and mission critical need to achieve and drive change in a large number of areas in the next few years inside and outside the company.


At the STM event in Frankfurt in October, you outlined your impressions of the first year in the industry. Could you revisit a few key areas for us? As a ‘newbie’ to the industry I have over the


past year been doing what all people in new roles do and that is to find out why things really are as they are. In my speech, I chose to share some early observations with the aim of starting more of a conversation around the root causes of where we are as an industry, as well as some of the emotions surrounding it. With this in mind, I said that I’d arrived with many assumptions and expectations.


I thought that academic publishing,


given it is a 200-year-old industry, would be very, very efficient in its core editorial, author management, pre-production and production processes, and in its value delivery to customers and the wider research community, and any opportunities and challenges would be coming from the second order effect of digitisation. I also thought I would be joining a world-


wide science community full of ideas on how to improve the scientific process, with lots of cross-publisher and cross- stakeholder engagement to find solutions to key issues together. I was right in some of the above, and in


the fact that everyone in the community shares a strong common belief in the purpose of science. Everyone I have spoken to in the past year, publishers, scientists, policy makers, funders, institute leaders, librarians, believe in the importance of science and hold as a common objective the need to communicate it. But on others I was wrong. Some of the


very core processes of publishing haven’t changed as much as I would have expected and, coming as I did, from a digital process business, this was surprising. And the degree of cooperation and


coordination is also significantly lower than I expected, leaving many opportunities untapped. But most worrying is the fact


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