Our commitment to disability inclusion

Springer Nature Group
By: Frank Vrancken Peeters, Fri Jan 29 2021

Today, Springer Nature is announcing its commitment to the aims of the Valuable 500

At Springer Nature, we believe that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are essential to achieving our mission of opening doors to discovery. We recognise that systemic barriers to equality exist and so we want to play our part by acting purposefully and striving for meaningful change. 

Our approach to DEI is holistic, while focusing on certain crucial topics, including disability inclusion. 

We want everyone at Springer Nature to contribute their best and thrive, by together creating a diverse and inclusive culture with structures that support equitable opportunities for merit-based success. 

Working to eliminate barriers to creating, discovering and using knowledge, we aim to contribute towards more equitable outcomes in learning and advancing scholarship.

We are committed to making progress. 

In 2021, we will take further steps to ensure our recruitment processes follow best practice in terms of being inclusive and accessible, and will become a Disability Confident organisation in the UK.

We will continue to build and support our global employee groups focused on disability and neurodiversity. 

Our inclusive culture drives our ambition to increase and improve accessibility across the business, in all that we publish. We value all of our users and customers equally and strive to create products that meet their different needs and requirements. In 2020, we started employing accessibility specialists to help support teams to improve the accessibility of our products and, in 2021, we will create an accessibility steering group to advise, guide, and review our progress across Springer Nature, to make our content more accessible to all. We are committed to improving user experience and significantly increasing user-experience research with participants with a disability (working towards a longer-term aim of 20% representation). 

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Author: Frank Vrancken Peeters

Chief Executive Officer

Frank Vrancken Peeters joined Springer Nature in 2017 as Chief Commercial Officer and became CEO in September 2019. He has spent more than 25 years in the media and publishing sectors, with leadership roles across a range of strategic and delivery business functions in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer contexts. Frank has previously had senior positions at: Wolters Kluwer, where he was Regional Managing Director, Legal and Regulatory, Western Europe; at Infinitas Learning, where he was Chief Operating Officer; and Elsevier Science, where he served as MD Government and Academic Markets, MD ScienceDirect and MD Global Sales, in each case building and growing significant-scale, complex international businesses. Frank holds a Master’s in Business Administration from the Erasmus University Rotterdam.