Clarivate Analytics acquires Kopernio, bringing one-click access to millions of research articles

The strategic acquisition of AI-technology startup Kopernio (now EndNote Click) by Clarivate Analytics, is set to revolutionize how researchers access research articles across the globe.

The world of research is growing and diversifying at an unprecedented pace, resulting in a proliferation of research papers across an expanding frontier of discovery. The resulting body of collective knowledge is the foundation for scientific and technological innovation across global industries. To sustain this impact, researchers need access to each other’s data to interrogate their validity, verify their own findings, replicate experiments and progress their work.

To deliver this outcome, every year, 10 million researchers around the globe access 2.5 billion journal articles (in .PDF format) to conduct their research, while universities invest millions of dollars to provide access to academic journals.                                             

Critical problems consequently emerge within the research industry itself: access to the best, legally authorized, versions of published results.

Researchers often face circuitous and time-consuming routes to access the journal articles they need, even when their institutions and organizations have legitimate subscription access. Not only do these barriers waste time and cause frustration, they have also resulted in the growth of social sharing networks and a “dark web” of crowdsourced journal articles.

Publishers, too, face the problem of having articles appear on unauthorized sites, unable to monitor the quality of the online versions or the subsequent usage of the material.

Jan Reichelt (co-founder of Mendeley) and Ben Kaube (co-founder of Newsflo) founded Kopernio to tackle this pervasive problem. Together, they developed Kopernio, a technology start-up that enables academics and researchers worldwide to legally access journal articles online via a single click using “smart links”. These links are created through integration with a user’s institutional subscriptions or, when subscriptions aren’t available, by connecting users to open-access versions wherever possible.

Clarivate Analytics and Kopernio have a shared vision: to streamline the process of scientific discovery and to develop innovative industry-leading products that make the world of research more accessible.

To realize this vision, we will harness the scale, accuracy and reach of our unique citation network, Web of Science, and complement it with Kopernio’s researcher-facing product. This combination will allow us significantly to increase access to research articles and provide novel solutions to the problems constraining the research ecosystem.

Kopernio will also allow institutions to better provide and track users’ access to subscribed resources and increase the reach of publishers’ content: economically, speedily and legitimately.

Annette Thomas, CEO,  Scientific & Academic Research division at Clarivate, explained that “Clarivate’s acquisition of Kopernio 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.”

As part of the acquisition, Reichelt and Kaube have also joined Clarivate Analytics—Reichelt as Managing Director of Web of Science, Kaube as Managing Director of Kopernio.

“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,” commented Reichelt.

Find out more about this news here, or follow conversations on social media using #KopernioJoinsClarivate.

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