Science media is a tough place to be independent and it just got tougher. Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, the part of the family company that owns Nature and Scientific American and others, with  Springer Science+Business Media, investment banked by BC Partners. Macmillan Science and Education, namely Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan and the global businesses of Macmillan Education will all be under the same banner.

The new corporate media teamup results in a €1.5 billion revenue business and 13,000 employees. Holtzbrinck retains a 53% share in the new corporation. The merger vaults the new group above McGraw-Hill (€1.4bn), Cengage (ca. €1.3bn) and Wiley (€1.3bn) to become the fourth biggest STM and Education publisher after Pearson (€5.6bn), Reed Elsevier (€4.4bn) and Wolters Kluwer (€3.6bn).

Link: Macmillan Science and Education to merge with Springer Science+Business Media by Benedicte Page, The Bookseller