Confirmed: Elsevier Has Bought Mendeley For $69M-$100M To Expand Its Open, Social Education Data Efforts

Educational publisher Elsevier is diving deeper into the world of open and social educational data: it has bought Mendeley, the London/New York-based provider of a platform for academics and organizations to share research and collaborate with others via a social network. The terms of the deal have not been publicly disclosed but we understand it is for a sum between $69 million and $100 million. We first broke the news of this deal when it was still being negotiated, in January.

The acquisition will heat up competition between Elsevier and other large publishers moving into ed-tech, among them Thomson Reuters, which owns EndNote, a competitor to Mendeley.

Mendeley is both a technology/platform acquisition as well as an acqui-hire for Elsevier. CEO Victor Henning, one of the three PhD co-founders of Mendeley, tells us in an interview that all of Mendeley’s 50 staff are coming over to Elsevier, and Henning will become VP of strategy for the company — a sign that Elsevier may be gearing up for more activity and possibly acquisitions in this space. (Picture of that Mendeley team taken earlier is below, complete with kitschy hologram.)

Olivier Dumon, MD of academic and government research markets at Elsevier, says that the company does not plan to merge Mendeley with existing Elsevier products that once used to compete against it, such as Scopus, “but we will integrate it better.”

Elsevier notes that in some regards it’s been working with Mendeley since 2009. “Elsevier has referred users to Mendeley, invited Mendeley to build apps on ScienceDirect using its open APIs, and sponsored Mendeley’s Science Online London conferences on Open Science,” the company said in a statement on the acquisition.

Mendeley — which was founded in 2008 and has raised just under $12 million in funding from investors including Access Industries, Passion Capital, and Tom Glocer — will keep running both its main platform as well as its Institutional Edition, aimed at helping universities and other large organizations track research and what’s being read in real time. Mendeley currently has 2.3 million users on its platform (up from 2.1 million in January), as well as 24 “high profile” institutions across North America, Europe and Asia. The plan is to expand the amount of free services offered across those, such as doubling the amount of storage for individuals to 2 gigabytes.

It will also keep its API free and open to use: that API today is used by some 300 apps, up from 260 in January.

Henning says Mendeley will continue to source data from different places — not just focus on what’s published or owned by Elsevier. “If people want to source the latest research on neurobiology, it wouldn’t make sense to limit this,” said Henning. “Elsevier will help us by enriching our content, but when it comes to other publishers it will also increase the transit routes into them.”

The acquisition also will mean that Mendeley can shift gears a bit. In the past, it charged users for extras like more storage space, usage packages for larger teams and so on, services that helped the company triple its revenues in the past year. Henning says that if it had remained independent there would have been more of a pressure to push revenue generation even more. “But I think with Elsevier we can take a longer term perspective,” he says. “What do our users want, rather than having to monetize too early. The focus will be to growing our user base rather than trying to monetize right away.”

As part of that, Mendeley also now wants to focus resources on some projects that it has been wanting to tackle for some time. The company already has a strong use on iOS devices; now it will be looking to launch an Android app later this year.

When we first broke the news that the two companies were in acquisition talks, I noticed a lot of negative chatter in the comments of the story and elsewhere — in fact you might argue that some of the sweetened deals such as increased storage are there to help hold on to skeptical users — with many concerned that the product would become too proprietary or commercial as a result. Henning is insistent that this won’t happen here.

“If you look at any acquisition, whether its Mailbox getting bought by Dropbox or us, people are always anxious about what will happen to a service,” he says. “In our case it will accelerate our vision.”

Update: Since posting last night, Mendeley’s published a Q&A on the deal here, and I’ve had a couple of others getting in touch passing on other information on price, with one, claiming to be close to the deal, suggesting a lower sale price of €50 million ($65 million).

sourcehttp://techcrunch.com/2013/04/08/confirmed-elsevier-has-bought-mendeley-for-69m-100m-to-expand-open-social-education-data-efforts/

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British Libraries Push Back

Perpustakaan penyelidikan utama di Britain telah memberitahu kedua-dua penerbit jurnal terbesar bahawa mereka tidak akan memperbaharui 'tawaran besar "dengan mereka, jika mereka tidak membuat penurunan harga sebenar.

more:

Major research libraries in Britain have told the two largest journal publishers that they will not renew their "big deals" with them if they do not make significant real-terms price reductions.

Research Libraries UK, which includes the Russell Group university libraries, as well as Britain's national libraries and Trinity College Library Dublin, have told Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell that they will not renew their current deals when they expire at the end of this year unless the concession is made

Big deals involve libraries paying a blanket fee for electronic access to a publisher’s entire journal catalog. They were initially welcomed by librarians when they were first introduced a decade ago. However, David Prosser, RLUK’s executive director, said consistent above-inflation price increases and the current squeeze on library budgets meant that big deals were accounting for an ever-greater proportion of libraries’ budgets and were no longer affordable.

Elsevier publishes around 2,000 journals, including The Lancet and Cell. Wiley-Blackwell publishes around 1,500 journals. Publishers argue that big deals have seen the unit cost of access to research articles drop considerably and that price rises are justified due to the ongoing expansion in research outputs and, consequently, journals.

But Prosser said publishers had made large savings from the shift to electronic submission and distribution, which had "not necessarily been passed on to the customer."

If the libraries cancel their big deals, they intend to make savings by buying only high-use journals from the publishers. Articles from lower-use journals will be shared between them in an electronic version of an inter-library loan. Prosser admitted that the publishers might react by putting up the price of high-use journals, but predicted that such a move would fall foul of competition authorities. He said he expected that libraries would already be talking to researchers about the titles that could be dropped with the least impact.

"It is not a question of whether we drop journals, it is a question of which we drop," he said. "In my view it is better to drop low-use titles bundled into packages than to drop medium-use titles from smaller publishers outside big deals [so that we maintain] a healthy publishing environment with a wide variety of publishers."

RLUK also wants publishers to quote prices and price rises in sterling so that library budgets are not affected by currency fluctuations.

"If you are spending over £1 million ($1.64 million) a year on one big deal those fluctuations can be quite significant," he said. "They should be a risk for commercial bodies to take on board rather than public sector bodies like universities."

He said Russell Group vice chancellors were backing the librarians’ stance, as was the National Union of Students.

Usman Ali, vice-president for higher education at the NUS, said: "For too long private publishing companies have been getting away with gouging universities on journal costs. It is time the publishing companies made themselves accountable to the wider academic community in the UK."

Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell declined to comment.

via: 

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/08/18/british_university_libraries_push_back_on_costs_of_journals

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