Clarivate Analytics Acquires Research Startup Kopernio to Accelerate Pace of Scientific Innovation

This acquisition will address a well-documented issue in the discovery and access of scientific and academic research today, which stems from the circuitous, time-consuming and manual routes that researchers take to access the journal articles they need, even when their institutions and organisations have legitimate subscription access. This has resulted in the growth of social sharing networks and a hotly discussed dark web of crowdsourced journal articles.

Kopernio uses artificial intelligence to enable users to seamlessly access journal articles with just one-click, saving researchers time and frustration when accessing their institutional subscriptions. Kopernio automatically detects what individual or institutional subscriptions a user already possesses and facilitates instant access to the chosen article. It will also suggest free, alternative legal versions of the content that might already exist on openly available platforms if a user lacks the required subscriptions to access content behind a paywall.

Kopernio was founded by Jan Reichelt and Ben Kaube, the co-founders of Mendeley and Newsflo, respectively. With a proven track record of creating innovative technology solutions for the research community, Reichelt will join the group as Managing Director, Web of Science, and report to Annette Thomas (CEO, Scientific and Academic Research), whilst continuing to support Kopernio's growth and strategic direction as the company's President. Kaube will join as Managing Director, Kopernio.

Clarivate Analytics will invest in and scale-up Kopernio, while integrating it within other Clarivate products and services along with third-party platforms and partners. Kopernio intends to quickly build a valuable commercial offering for publishers and academic institutions.

Annette Thomas, CEO,  Scientific & Academic Research division at Clarivate Analytics explained:  "This is a strategic investment to acquire and scale a highly complementary business; the combined effect of which will address a major issue in scientific and academic research today. The scale, reach and unique citation network of Web of Science, the world's most trusted and extensive publisher-neutral citation index and research analysis platform, combined with Kopernio's researcher-facing product, will allow us to significantly increase access to research articles and provide novel solutions to the problems in research across the ecosystem. It further establishes our commitment to develop world-class innovative products to address critical challenges in one of the most important fields our society relies on: science and research."

Jan Reichelt, Co-Founder, Kopernio and incoming Managing Director at Web of Science added,  "The global scale as well as the publisher-neutral position of Clarivate Analytics will allow us to quickly scale Kopernio and finally help solve one of the most frustrating and time-consuming research problems today. It's amazing to get another opportunity to help advance the technologies that support researchers in their daily work. Our partnership with Clarivate will allow us to develop new features that will be available to ten million researchers and scientists worldwide and in addition will provide valuable support and insights for publishers and academic institutions too."

Both Clarivate and Kopernio share a strong commitment to transforming the way articles are delivered to  researchers whilst supporting the existing ecosystem between publishers and institutions. Each year, 10 million researchers around the globe access 2.5 billion journal articles (in PDF format) in order to conduct their research, whilst universities invest millions to provide access to academic journals.¹   

About Kopernio: Kopernio is a London-based startup, established in 2017, by the founders of Mendeley and Newsflo. Kopernio's vision is to provide immediate one-click access to academic journal articles, dramatically improving and facilitating access to scientific knowledge worldwide. For more information, please visit kopernio.com.

About Jan Reichelt: Jan Reichelt is the former Co-Founder of Mendeley, a global research collaboration platform. Jan led the company from foundation to acquisition by Reed Elsevier (now RELX) in 2013. He continued to lead Mendeley while at Elsevier, successfully growing it to service millions of users. Jan also supports other startups as an angel investor, was named "European Founder of the Year 2013", and sits on the board of Emerge Education, an EdTech-focused accelerator, and previously served as an advisor to SAP's supervisory board. He graduated with an MBA, having studied Business and Information Management in Germany, England and Italy.

About Clarivate Analytics: Clarivate Analytics is the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to accelerate the pace of innovation. Building on a heritage going back more than a century and a half, we have built some of the most trusted brands across the innovation lifecycle, including Web of Science, Cortellis, Derwent, CompuMark, MarkMonitor and Techstreet. Today, Clarivate Analytics is a new and independent company on a bold entrepreneurial mission to help our clients radically reduce the time from new ideas to life-changing innovations. For more information, please visit clarivate.com.

About Web of Science: Web of Science is the world's most trusted and largest publisher-neutral citation index, powering global discovery and citation analytics across the sciences, social sciences and art & humanities. With over 1.4 billion cited references going back to 1900 and millions of users per day—from leading government and academic institutions and research-intensive corporations—the Web of Science citation network serves as the foundation for the Journal Impact Factor, InCites, and other powerful and trusted citation-impact measures. The Web of Science helps researchers, research institutions, publishers, and funders discover and assess the citation impact of over a century of research publications found in the most prestigious books, conference proceedings, and journals.

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