Clarivate Analytics today announced the strategic acquisition of AI-technology startup Kopernio, to create the definitive publisher-neutral platform for research workflow and analysis for scientific researchers, publishers and institutions worldwide. Kopernio’s vision is to legally provide one-click access to millions of journal articles and academic research papers across the globe, dramatically improving and facilitating access to scientific knowledge.
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 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. 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
