ReadCube, an innovative software developer serving researchers, publishers, academic and commercial organizations, today acquired Papers from global academic publisher Springer Nature.

Papers is a London-based, reference manager tool which helps researchers find and organize a personal library and cite research literature. The business will be headed by Robert McGrath, CEO at ReadCube. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Both companies were borne out of academia; both Papers and ReadCube were created by researchers for researchers. ReadCube was developed by Harvard researchers, whilst Papers was the creation of postdoctoral researchers at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. Its founders set out with an identical goal, to solve the problem they faced on a daily basis – to enable academic and scientific researchers to organize, read, cite and share research material from the growing mountain of electronic papers and articles available to them.

“For some time we’ve admired Papers’ award winning app for the Mac. Today we are proud to add Papers to the ReadCube portfolio of solutions for researchers,” said Robert McGrath, CEO and co-founder of ReadCube.“We look forward to working with the Papers user community to continue to build on the impressive work the Papers team has done to date.  It is through close collaborations with researchers, publishers, and institutions that ReadCube and its solutions in this space are helping connect data, facilitate discovery and improve the accessibility of literature.  Through this acquisition we hope to accelerate the pace of discovery.”