D. Reidel was an academic publishing company based in Dordrecht established in the 1960s.
[citation needed] David Reidel himself had been trained under an ex-Elsevier manager, M. D. Frank, who considered third-generation Dutch publishers like Reidel to be the "grandchildren" of the German publishing company, Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft of Leipzig, where Frank himself was trained.
Other players included Dr. W. Junk, P. Noordhoff and M. Nijhoff, who were all to become part of a group that began in the 1970s and which resulted in the establishment of Kluwer Academic Publishers.
[citation needed] In spring 2004, Cinven and Candover purchased Springer, merging the operations of all the publishers into one conglomerate, Springer Science+Business Media, now "the second largest commercial scholarly publisher in the world" after Elsevier.
[citation needed] Aka had been co-founded by Walter Jalowicz (who changed his name to Johnson and later worked for Academic Press in New York) and his son-in-law K. Jacoby, together with the physicist (and spy) Paul Rosbaud (later of Butterworth), and chemist E. Proskauer (later vice-president of John Wiley & Sons).