Springer will move more science publishing to India

Springer Science+Business Media, a Dutch scientific and specialist literature publisher, satisfied with the quality of work and manpower skills is to move more work to India.

Addressing a press conference here on Wednesday, Derk Haank, CEO of Springer said "given the high quality and high productivity, we are now expanding our other business process beyond typical production work and into services for the financial and marketing sectors."

"There is no end to the possibilities. It has been my experience that the energy and enthusiasm present here, combined with a 'can do attitude', has exceeded my expectations," he added.

Currently, company's quarter of the work is done from India, the aim is to move up the value chain and get half of our publishing and editing work from here, he noted.

Company gets nearly two-thirds of scientific and one-third business media work done from India.

According to Haank, the company is ranked first with 25 per cent market share in scientific book publishing (with 4,000 books printed annually) and in scientific journals ranked second with one million articles and has 10 per cent share.

"In addition to outsourcing work, seeing the kind of work we are getting in India we are seriously looking at buying a local company for which we are actively scouting," he said. The company in India is present through two entities -- Springer India based in Delhi and Scientific Publishing Services based in Chennai.

"About 5000 employees work in 19 different countries. In India alone we have about 1,200 and have plans to double it in short time," he said.

The company has been actively involved with the Indian digital library project and other resource-sharing initiatives by providing scientific and research content.

The company is also involved in networking of all major research institutes, special libraries and engineering colleges to global database platform -- Springer Link, said Haank.

Some of the major consortia initiatives in India are UGC Infonet, (university education), INDEST (technical education), CSIR (industrial research, ISI (statistical research), FORSAA (physical sciences research0 and TIFR (basic science research).

"We also are seeing rapid growth all over Asia and in India in particular. India is not only important for us in terms of researchers who seek to publish and become our authors, but we are also seeing an increase in subscriptions which is well above average," he added.