Ithaka Announces $2.5 Million Investment to Open Annotation Provider Hypothesis & Say Hello to Anno

From a Letter Posted by Kevin Guthrie, Ithaka President (via Ithaka.org):

I am excited to share today that we have invested $2.5 million in Anno, the public-benefit corporation that is home to the nonprofit Hypothesis.

As you may know, Hypothesis is a tool that enables people to annotate documents and webpages. Its free browser extension is in use by a million people globally, with a version that integrates with learning management systems now installed at 200 colleges and universities. We see tremendous potential for tools like Hypothesis that are open and interoperable to improve teaching and learning.

In addition to the investment, we are working on a pilot project with Anno to enable the use of Hypothesis with the text-based materials on JSTOR through learning management systems. As an organization with a mission to expand access to knowledge and education, ITHAKA’s investment and this collaboration will support the use and study of the materials you and we have worked so hard to produce, preserve and make accessible. I encourage you to read our public announcement as well as Anno’s blog post for more details.

As you can tell, we are excited about our relationship with Anno. Their purpose is “to build new open, interoperable infrastructure connecting the world’s people and ideas over all content on every platform using a new unit of speech—the digital annotation—to enable a world of diverse collaborative services for the benefit of humanity.” At a time when learning and understanding from our past, present, and future—and from one another—is so desperately needed, we are eager to play a role in bringing this vision to life.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing more about the promise of social annotation and what we are learning through the JSTOR-Hypothesis pilot. Keep an eye out in our upcoming newsletters for a short video showing how the integration will work, including some back-end authentication magic within the learning management system that obviates the need for content to be downloaded locally, ensuring that use of those materials happens on the JSTOR platform—an approach we know is important to both publishers and librarians.

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Kevin Guthrie
President, ITHAKA

From a Hypothesis Blog Post by Dan Whaley, Founder/CEO:

In 2019, we and others formed Invest In Open Infrastructure (IOI), an “initiative to dramatically increase the amount of funding available to open scholarly infrastructure.” We recruited Kaitlin Thaney to that effort, and she has been doing a terrific job laying the foundation for this.

But all this would take time we didn’t have.

In response, and to better position us to achieve our long-held mission, we’ve formed Anno, a public benefit corporation (formally “Annotation Unlimited, PBC”) that shares the Hypothesis mission as well as its team. We’ve done this so that we can take investment in a mission aligned way and scale the Hypothesis service to meet the opportunity in front of us.

Anno is funded by a $14M seed round that includes a $2.5M investment from ITHAKA, the nonprofit provider of JSTOR, a digital library that serves more than 13,000 education institutions around the world, providing access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images and primary sources in 75 disciplines. Also participating in the round are At.inc, Triage Ventures, Esther Dyson, Mark Pincus and others. ITHAKA’s president, Kevin Guthrie, has joined Anno’s board as an observer.

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Anno will help us scale Hypothesis in the higher education and research markets. We believe there is no better way to bring annotation to the larger world than through institutions of learning and the students, faculty, scientists and scholars that rely on us. The nonprofit Hypothesis Project will focus on advocacy, standards and the development of the larger paradigm of open annotation beyond our implementation.

While our organizational structure might be evolving, our approach remains the same. We’re still the same Hypothesis: We’ll still develop open source software based on open standards, we’ll still champion the same principles we were founded on, and we’ll still speak up when we see things that just aren’t right. Importantly, a Hypothesis account will remain free for individual users.

For our institutional customers in higher education, nothing will change — not the product, not the support you receive and not the way you do business with us.

Read the Complete Blog Post (view Additional Interview with Esther Dyson)

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