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Academic publisher John Wiley & Sons has acquired Silicon Valley-based publishing software company Atypon in a $120m (£91.5m) cash deal.
Atypon, founded in 1996 and headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, works with publishers to deliver, host, enhance, market and manage their content on the web. Its clients, which use it as either a journal-delivery platform or as a means to supplement end-user engagement, include Literatum, a company that accounts for a third of the world's English-language scholarly journal articles. It hosts nearly 9,000 journals, 13m journal articles and more than 1,800 publication web sites for over 1,500 societies and publishers.
Wiley, a 209-year old organistion, says it will offer "financial stability and continuity" to Atypon, while allowing it to function and be managed as a separate business unit. Atypon is currently rolling out "significant enhancements" to the platform, it said.
It allayed privacy concerns by noting, as part of the acquisition announcement, that the data and plans from each of Atypon’s clients will "remain sequestered and behind firewalls".
Wiley will itself become an Atypon customer, too.
Mark Allin, president and c.e.o of Wiley, said: “Wiley is committed to enabling the success of our customers and partners to advance research, discovery and learning. Atypon offers an outstanding set of publishing solutions that can help industry participants like Wiley drive the discovery of research. We will ensure Atypon’s flexible platform continues to fully support the research community and industry partners so they may better serve their own customers.”
Georgios Papadopoulos, Atypon’s founder and c.e.o., will continue to lead the business, reporting to Allin.
He said: “We have worked hard with our partners to build the industry’s premier publishing platform and support the needs of the research community. Atypon is delivering solid growth and marked its most successful year in 2015, nearly doubling its staff in two years. With Wiley’s commitment we are very excited about the many opportunities to accelerate the expansion of Atypon’s service offerings strengthening the fabric of scholarly communications, expanding access, readership, and utilization, lowering operating costs, enabling organizations to create and expand offerings and products on their own, and building value for all stakeholders.”