Press release from De Gruyter regarding acquisition of Versita re #OpenAccess

This press release may be of interest to those interested in Open Access publishing so I am posting it here:


De Gruyter acquires Versita and becomes third-biggest international Open Access publisher

Berlin, January 9, 2012

De Gruyter, the Berlin-based academic publishing company, is acquiring the publisher Versita. As a service provider to academic organizations and bodies, Versita publishes over 230 journals on Open Access basis, i.e. outside the traditional subscription model. With this acquisition De Gruyter is substantially increasing its presence in an important future market of academic publishing. The complete staff of Versita is being retained in this take-over.

“The purchase of Versita is a logical continuation of our publishing strategy of recent years, which involves giving both our authors and our customers an optimum range of publishing options”, says Dr. Sven Fund, the Managing Director of De Gruyter. “For us, the most important issue is that our publications have high-quality content, and not how they are financed.”

As of 2012 De Gruyter will be merging the newly acquired Open Access journals with its traditional subscription-based and freely sold content on one electronic platform, thus providing researchers with an outstanding service: users will have a powerful search interface for searching all academic articles from journals, books and databanks in which the articles have been published, independently of the various business models.

“For some time now, Open Access has been an important element of academic publishing. With the integration of all Versita content under a joint publishing administration on the new De Gruyter platform, we are now realizing the principle in our program,” continues Fund.

In the future, De Gruyter’s Open Access activities will be managed by Jacek Ciesielski as Vice President Open Access. Ciesielski founded Versita in 2001 and has been expanding the enterprise ever since. “Now that we have joined forces with De Gruyter, I look forward to further developing and internationalizing my activities together with De Gruyter”, comments Ciesielski.

Contact:

Ulrike Lippe

Manager Public Relations

Phone +49(0)30-260 05 153

ulrike.lippe@degruyter.com

De Gruyter: The independent academic publishing house De Gruyter can look back on a history spanning over 260 years.  The publishing group with headquarters in Berlin and Boston annually publishes over 800 new titles in the humanities, medicine, science and law and more than 230 journals and digital media. http://www.degruyter.com/

Versita publishes about 250 own and third-party scholarly journals across many disciplines. Its journal portfolio takes in 25 subscription-based journals, including a group of Central European Journals in 8 disciplines. Versita also publishes over 230 society journals, which are available through Versita Open (www.versitaopen.com), one of the largest Open Access platforms in the world. The company was established in 2001 by Jacek Ciesielski.http://www.versita.com/