Wiley takeover will 'accelerate Atypon expansion'

John Wiley & Sons has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Atypon, the Silicon Valley-based publishing-software company, for $120 million. Atypon enables scholarly societies and publishers to deliver, host, enhance, market and manage their content on the web. The transaction is expected to close October 1, 2016.

Atypon is privately held and headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, with approximately 260 employees in the U.S. and EMEA. The company provides Literatum, a platform that primarily serves the large scientific, technical, medical and scholarly industry. This software gives publishers direct control over how their content is displayed, promoted and monetized on the web. The company generated more than $31 million in revenue in 2015.

Atypon’s Literatum hosts nearly 9,000 journals, 13 million journal articles and more than 1,800 publication web sites for over 1,500 societies and publishers, accounting for a third of the world’s English-language scholarly journal articles.

Atypon will be managed as a separate business unit within Wiley. The data and plans from each of Atypon’s clients will remain sequestered and behind firewalls, while Wiley will itself become an Atypon customer.

'Wiley is committed to enabling the success of our customers and partners to advance research, discovery and learning,' said Mark Allin, President and CEO of Wiley. 'Atypon offers an outstanding set of publishing solutions that can help industry participants like Wiley drive the discovery of research. We will ensure Atypon’s flexible platform continues to fully support the research community and industry partners so they may better serve their own customers.'

Georgios Papadopoulos, Atypon’s founder and CEO, will continue to lead the business and will report to Allin. He said: 'We have worked hard with our partners to build the industry’s premier publishing platform and support the needs of the research community.

'Atypon is delivering solid growth and marked its most successful year in 2015, nearly doubling its staff in two years. With Wiley’s commitment we are very excited about the many opportunities to accelerate the expansion of Atypon’s service offerings strengthening the fabric of scholarly communications, expanding access, readership, and utilisation, lowering operating costs, enabling organisations to create and expand offerings and products on their own, and building value for all stakeholders.'