Completing the publishing services value proposition - Sheridan acquires PubFactory!
Since 2010, PubFactory as a platform has provided online hosting and consultative services for scholarly publishers globally. Over the years we’ve guided publishers in bringing their journals, books, and reference work content from traditional print to digital form. And along the way, we’ve become true partners to our publishers, embedding in their businesses and integrating our roadmap priorities with theirs, including Oxford University Press, the IMF, and De Gruyter.
On 26 May Sheridan finalised acquisition of PubFactory from O'Reilly Media and we are now Sheridan PubFactory. This acquisition is monumental and allows PubFactory and Sheridan Journal Services to more fully serve our existing clients by now being able to deliver a complete end-to-end offering from pre-publication to hosting to post-publication services.
Becoming Sheridan PubFactory means that PubFactory now goes beyond just developing and delivering technologies, but will now be part of the Sheridan service package that Sheridan offers as an expert in the mechanics of publisher workflows. Sheridan’s huge depth of experience in the scholarly journal segment, especially the North American society marketplace, creates compelling opportunities for publishers to work with two trusted partners in a single consolidated organisation.
Publishers will receive the benefit of efficiencies and significantly greater access to resources from the technology and service side.
PubFactory will continue providing technologies and hosting services to our publisher clients by:
- Enabling content customisation;
- Strengthening publisher brands;
- Handing over product development tools;
- Providing support for hundreds of sales models;
- Delivering usage data and analytics; and
- Delivery of tools driving user engagement and loyalty.
Sheridan Journal Services and PubFactory will be collaborating to extend our offering across both of our existing client lists and into and beyond our shared list of prospective clients. This will be especially relevant for STM society journal publishers who have core journal publishing services but who want to expand into publishing other kinds of content including books and conference proceedings.
Sheridan has a large customer service team and PubFactory is delighted to integrate into an organisation that shares our customer-centric focus. This will be a significant advantage as we grow and expand our Sheridan PubFactory offering.The two organisations complement each other in many ways and the synergies are compelling.
Sheridan has long sought to extend its services to be able to provide hosting capabilities to its customers. Building a new platform from scratch is expensive and the marketplace has a number of existing entrenched options. As a robust, mature platform, PubFactory has a proven track record of supporting mixed content journals and books publishers and also supports new and innovative publishing initiatives. In addition, PubFactory has an especially strong client base in Europe, while Sheridan is most well known in the USA.
‘We are delighted to offer our journal and book publishers this proven and comprehensive hosting and publishing platform,’ said Gary Kittredge, managing director of Sheridan Journal Services. PubFactory will propel Sheridan into a new level of engagement with our customers as we extend our range of services from high-touch editorial production and print solutions to hosting our customers’ content – a complete package.’
Notable publishers including Bloomsbury Publishing, Brill, Edward Elgar Publishing, Harvard University Press, Peter Lang, and others have since joined the growing list of PubFactory customers. PubFactory’s configurable suite of front-end and back-end capabilities allows for optimal support across content types, making it a truly content agnostic platform that is host to 1400+ journals, 400,000+ books, and numerous database and reference work products.
José Fossi, VP of client services at PubFactory, added: ‘I’m ecstatic for PubFactory to become a primary part of Sheridan’s business and to embrace the many opportunities our integration will offer both teams. The richness of the synergies between our two groups is quite astonishing. It's hard to think of a better partner – we complete each other's offering and share customer centric cultural values.’
