According to Liblicense, Peter Suber’s blog, and the Guardian, Springer Science and Business Media is believed to be preparing the business for sale. Candover and Cinven, are the private equity companies that own Springer and, reportedly, buyers have until the end of next week to register their interest. According to Candover, Springer is worth 1.65 billion Euros. Springer is more stable, apparently since it does not rely heavily on advertising revenue as many other publishers. Springer, which has published many leading lights in science (Marie Curie, Albert Einstein to mention a few) was founded by Julius Springer in 1842.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/03/springer-on-block.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/26/publisher-springer-put-up-fo...
http://www.cinven.com
http://www.candoverinvestments.com
http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/index.shtml

Just picked this up from a post on liblicence by Bernie Sloan. "Interesting item in Nature's news section about the journal 'RNA
Biology' and Wikipedia: 'Anyone submitting to a section of the journal RNA Biology will, in the future, be required to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. The journal will then peer review the page before publishing it in Wikipedia.'" Is this a new model for encyclopedias?
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081216/full/news.2008.1312.html