Scholarly Publishing: Full Text of Letter from bepress CEO Thanking Subscribers
As we shared (via No Shelf Required) about two weeks ago, bepress (Berkeley Electronic Press) has been acquired to De Gruyter.
Earlier this week, Jean‐Gabriel Bankier, President and CEO of bepress, wrote a letter to thank subscribers.
The full text of the letter is available on the web (PDF).
Here’s some of what Bankier has to say:
We founded Berkeley Electronic Press (“bepress”) with the goal of providing fast publishing journals that had scholar‐friendly access policies and reasonable pricing. We are proud of what we accomplished over the years; and we know that we could never have achieved what we did without your support. So, again: Thank you.
As the journal business grew, so too did bepress’s software‐as‐a ‐service business. We made the decision to exit the subscription‐based journal publishing business in order to focus all of our energies on Digital Commons, our software‐as‐a‐service institutional repository and publishing platform. While we are proud of the bepress journals and the innovative journal model we developed, we recognize that going forward we can best serve academia by dedicating ourselves to Digital Commons and publishing services. It has become clear to us that the academic library will play a critical role in the future of scholarly communications and so we are committing ourselves to library‐led publishing, research dissemination and open access.
Filed under: Academic Libraries, Libraries, Open Access, Publishing, Scholarly Communications

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.