[citation needed] 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.
"In the 1960s a mainly physics programme was established by D. Reidel Publishing Company in Dordrecht.
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).