Clarivate Analytics has acquired London-based startup Kopernio to help researchers access millions of science journals.
The accelerator will invest in and help to scaleup Kopernio and grow its commercial proposition.
Kopernio’s founders say they chose to sell to Clarivate Analytics over any other major publisher, so the platform could remain independent.
Established in 2017, by the founders of Mendeley and Newsflo, Kopernio hopes to provide immediate one-click access to academic journal articles.
As part of this acquisition, co-founder Jan Reichelt will remain chairperson of Kopernio whilst joining Clarivate as the new managing director of web of science.
Using artificial intelligence, 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.
Annette Thomas, CEO of scientific and academic research division at Clarivate Analytics, commented on the deal: “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 largest 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,” she added.
Newly acquired Kopernio hopes to speed up journal access whilst reducing the instance of crowdsourced articles on the darkweb.
Clarivate Analytics is an innovation accelerator that has previously backed Web of Science, Cortellis, Derwent, CompuMark, MarkMonitor and Techstreet.