Derk Haank

Derk Haank, born in 1953 in Terborg in the Netherlands, is a Dutch publishing manager. He studied business administration at the Free University of Amsterdam, where he also worked as a research associate from 1978 to 1986. In 1986 he moved into publishing and worked at several European subsidiaries of Elsevier Science in Oxford and London, and from 1991 he was chief executive of Misset, Elsevier's business to business division. From 1998 to 2004 he was chief executive of Elsevier and a board member of its parent company Reed Elsevier, and from February 2004 he was chief executive of Springer Science+Business Media. After that company merged with Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan and Macmillan Education in 2015, he became chief executive of the combined Springer Nature, and he retired from that post at the end of 2017.