Repositories and Preprints: bepress Acquired by Elsevier

Another Elsevier acquisition in the academic content and software space.
A list of several other acquisitions is found at the bottom of this post.
Firstthe Full Text of the News Release:

Elsevier today acquired bepress, a Berkeley, California-based business that helps academic libraries showcase and share their institutions’ research for maximum impact. Founded by three University of California, Berkeley professors in 1999, bepress allows institutions to collect, organize, preserve and disseminate their intellectual output, including preprints, working papers, journals or specific articles, dissertations, theses, conference proceedings and a wide variety of other data.
“Academic institutions want to help researchers share their work, showcase their capabilities and measure how well they’re performing,” said Jean-Gabriel Bankier, bepress CEO. “Now with Elsevier we’ll be stronger and better by applying more technologies and data and analytics capabilities to help more institutions achieve their research goals.”
Showcasing research is critical as competition increases among institutions to secure funding and attract faculty and students. By joining Elsevier, bepress will be better able to address institutions’ promotional needs, such as attracting students, faculty and grants, and preserving research data and outputs. Elsevier’s suite of research products, such as Scopus, Pure, SSRN and SciVal will enhance the breadth and quality of the reach, promotion and impact services bepress delivers to its customers.
“Bepress has led the way in helping institutions showcase their work,” said Olivier Dumon, Managing Director for Research Products at Elsevier. “We are pleased to welcome bepress to Elsevier and look forward to doing great things together.”
The academic community relies on tools to support more efficient and productive work. Bepress’s Digital Commons platform provides cross-repository aggregation and referencing by type of content or author into “Commons” or “Networks.” Bepress currently has content containing over 2 million articles and 100 million annual downloads.
The bepress CEO and employees will continue working with the company in Berkeley, California. The acquisition is effective immediately and terms of the agreement are not being disclosed.

Next, Roger Schonfeld has a through “must read” report and analysis on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Finally, a Comment From Gary Price (infoDOCKET Founder/Editor)
Along with the repository software and services that bepress providers customers they also aggregate many of these repositories into a public facing search tool named “Digital Commons Network (DCN).”
DCN is a research tool that I use regularly that Elsevier can quickly add a their logo to and promote. I hope it continues to be made available. It currently provides access to 2.2 million from 508 institutions.
I also hope as Elsevier expands in the OA arena that they do not stop allowing bepress repositories (and other Elsevier services with OA content) from being crawled (or feeds provided) by other preprint/open access content aggregators/search tools including SHARE, BASE, Microsoft Academic (Ver. 2.0 Launched Last Month), and others.
See Also: Other “Academic” Elsevier Acquisitions (2013-)
February 2, 2017
Altmetrics: Plum Analytics Acquired by Elsevier
June 7, 2016
Elsevier Acquires Laboratory Data Management Tool Hivebench
May 17, 2016
Elsevier Acquires Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
June 12, 2015
Elsevier Acquires Media Monitoring Company Newsflo
April 9, 2013
Elsevier is Acquiring Mendeley

on a Related Notes…

June 8, 2017
Continued Support for Harvard Law’s Caselaw Access Project After Project Partner (Ravel Law) Acquired by LexisNexis
LN is a RELX (Elsevier) Company

January 7, 2013
Elsevier Acquires Knovel

See Also:  Elsevier Acquires bepress in Bid to Boost its Academic Publishing and Analytics Services (via ZDNet)

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Conference Presentations, Data Files, Elsevier, Funding, Journal Articles, Libraries, Management and Leadership, News, Open Access, Publishing