Open research publisher and service provider Ubiquity is joining the Berlin-based academic publisher De Gruyter. Moving forward, the two companies will work together closely to advance both publishers’ mission to make academic research globally accessible and discoverable by offering excellent publishing services.
Ubiquity was founded by researchers in order to accelerate change towards open access and open science in 2012. Ubiquity publishes gold and diamond open access journals and books through its imprint Ubiquity Press, and supports 33 independent university presses with publishing services. Along with these partners, Ubiquity currently provides over 800 open access journals and more than 2,800 open access books. Ubiquity extended its services in 2021 with the launch of its institutional repositories platform, adding capacity to drive green open access and the dissemination of all research outputs, such as preprints and data.
In line with its principles, Ubiquity bases its journal, book and repository platforms on open source, and is an active contributor to these community-managed codebases. Ubiquity’s customer charter further testifies to the company’s commitment to openness, ensuring that the organization will always publish in open access, base its platforms on open source, and provide unbundled products. De Gruyter has agreed to the continuation of this charter, ensuring that Ubiquity will continue to operate according to these values and in partnership with the open community.
De Gruyter, an independent global publishing house founded in 1749 in Berlin, has been an advocate and early adopter of open access for over a decade. De Gruyter published its first open access book in 2010 and launched its first fully gold open access journal in 2013. Today, the publisher’s open access portfolio comprises more than 2,500 open access books and around 120 fully open access journals.
In 2012, De Gruyter acquired the open access publisher Versita, which now operates as Sciendo, to provide publishing services to academic institutions, societies and authors. Since launching its Publisher Partner Program in 2012 with Harvard University Press, which has since grown to over 20 partners, De Gruyter offers services such as full ebook collection distribution and archive digitization to many of the most prestigious academic publishing houses in the United States and worldwide.
By acquiring and investing in Ubiquity, De Gruyter will grow its existing open access and service business further and help the Ubiquity team reach their goals as an open research publisher and provider of open publishing services. As part of De Gruyter, Ubiquity will continue pursuing its mission to make quality open access publishing affordable and retain a high degree of independence to do so. The Ubiquity team and CEO and founder Brian Hole will keep working from their London office and remotely to continue their successful journey of researcher-led publishing.
“We are thrilled to join forces with De Gruyter, with whom we are very well-aligned in terms of values and a commitment to growing open access. De Gruyter’s Publisher Partner Program is a perfect example of where we can together provide a more comprehensive set of solutions to universities. In particular De Gruyter’s status as a family-owned company gives us and our community a strong assurance of a stable, long-term partnership and investment, with which we can continue to advance our mission in all areas of open access and open science,” said Brian Hole, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ubiquity.
“As a leading publisher of open access journals and books, we are excited to welcome Ubiquity to De Gruyter. Ubiquity brings a great team, technology, as well as valuable experience in providing open research publishing services to De Gruyter. Ubiquity’s offering perfectly complements our own open access mission and publishing services portfolio – I look forward to working together,” said Carsten Buhr, Managing Director of De Gruyter.
