Rumors about a possible acquisition have been circulating for months.
Today, a blog posts from Mendeley and Elsevier formally announce the Elsevier acquisition.
From the Mendeley Blog Post We Learn:
The most important things first: very little will change for you as a Mendeley user. In fact, Mendeley is only going to get better for you. For starters, we are doubling everyone’s storage space at no cost. Your free Mendeley account now comes with 2GB, Mendeley Plus and MIE accounts get upgraded to 5GB, and Mendeley Pro accounts to 10GB. There will always be a free version of Mendeley, and our functionality will continue to improve, now even faster than before.
[Clip]
Your data will still be owned by you, we will continue to support standard and open data formats for import and export to ensure that data portability, and – as explained recently – we will invest heavily in our Open API, which will further evolve as a treasure trove of openly licensed research data.
[Clip]
On a more personal note, let me also explain why we chose to team up with Elsevier at this point. Mendeley had just raised a significant round of funding from existing and new investors, with more investors wanting to join. Also, Mendeley’s revenues from our individual and team premium accounts, as well as our new Mendeley Institutional Edition, had tripled over the past year. We could have continued on our path independently, yet we felt that the opportunity to give our users access to better content, more data, and faster development was just too exciting to pass up.
Read the Complete Mendeley Blog Post
From the Elsevier Blog Post:
For Elsevier, we can build upon strong foundations in search and discovery by adding capabilities in document and citation management and sharing. By offering integration between Mendeley, Scopus and ScienceDirect, we can make this combined platform the central workflow and collaboration site for authors. In addition, we will be able to provide greater access to a growing repository of user-generated content while building tools that will enable researchers to search this growing body of research more precisely.
By joining forces, we will be in an even better position to support the needs of researchers. Our resources will enable Mendeley to continue building on its platform, keeping it free for individuals while introducing new content and interoperability that will make it even more useful.
[Clip]
Mendeley will remain a separate platform with a distinctive brand — the favorite daily destination site of researchers to check updates on their network, collaborate with other researchers, access their stored content, get alerts to relevant research domains, and make progress on their workflow efficiency and research in general.
[Clip]
For institutions, the Mendeley Institutional Edition (MIE) will continue to be available. MIE is a tool that helps universities analyze research activity in real-time, providing a complement to the traditional Impact Factor system of academic citations. It also enables librarians to extract more value out of resources by optimizing their subscriptions and providing a better service to their researchers by aggregating anonymized statistics about faculty and student paper reading habits.
Read the Complete Blog Post and News Release
Although financial terms were not disclosed, TechCrunch estimates Elsevier paid between between $69 million and $100 million.
About Gary Price
