D. Reidel was an academic publishing company based in Dordrecht. It joined with Kluwer in the 1990s as Kluwer/Reidel, together being purchased by Cinven and Candover in 2003. Cinven and Candover also purchased Springer, merging the operations of all the publishers into one conglomerate, Springer Science+Business Media, from Spring of 2004. This conglomerate is now "the second largest commercial scholarly publisher in the world" after Elsevier.

Arising out of the Dutch science publishing industry, which has a history influenced strongly by World War II, Reidel was established in the 1960s, with a focus on publishing research in physics. 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, Aka GmbH Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft (academic publishing company) of Leipzig, where Frank himself was trained. Aka itself was 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).