Pros
Genuinely dedicated people who are engaged with the products that they make and what they do. Teams are (or were, anyway) largely self-organising with a strong mandate to do what's right for customers.
Cons
Nature (the product and the company) has come off very badly in the recent merger. Staff have been voting with their feet, and an exodus of good people has left a tattered patchwork of projects in various stages of death, killed off by decree from on-high, regardless of how successful they were. The remaining ex-Nature staff have been ordered to "adapt to change" and choose new projects and teams, but any attempt at doing so is rebuffed by the ex-Springer staff who say they aren't needed. Very strong blame culture emanating from management, who are experts at dodging responsibility for the decisions that they make (or did they? Maybe somebody else made them!) and holding "Town Hall" meetings to tell everyone "none of this is my fault!" Nature/Macmillan used to be well-known for transparency and openness, at the organisational level and at the product level. That's all being dumped down the drain now with silly top-down deadlines being imposed, technical decisions being made without involving technical staff, and the abandonment of open source and web/document standards in favour of proprietary, closed-box systems.
