Personanondata: Swets Acquires MPS Scholarly Stats

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Swets Acquires MPS Scholarly Stats

The MPS resource management tool Scholarly Stats was quite innovative but in my opinion never really fit with the MPS core business. As a result I think they struggled to sell it into the library market and gain any significant market share. At a time when librarian's budgets are threatened or limited in some manner, Scholarly Stats is a tool librarian administrators can use for library usage statistics of licensed materials. From their website:

ScholarlyStats has been developed to provide information professionals with a single point of access to their vendor usage statistics. Providing faster access to consolidated data, it can help you to analyse usage of your online content more easily and more effectively. ScholarlyStats delivers consolidated reports to libraries around the globe, providing a clearer view of usage of over 70,000 journals and almost 450 databases from 46 platforms.

MPS was not a subscription agent as Swets and Ebsco are so could operate as a neutral party. With this purchase, the Scholarly Stats tool will be integrated into the Swetswise product portfolio and this will require some of the other platform providers and agents to beef up thier own tools for managing and monitoring licensed content usage.

More on the acquisition: Information Today

On a related note, the EU competition commission has cleared the acquisition of Swets by Glide Buyout Management Holding BV. This deal was previously announced in early September. Forbes

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: As the responsible Product Manager at Swets I can assure you that we will keep the ScholarlyStats service available for all customers and distributors. We will also invest in further enhancement of the service together with MPS Technologies, our outsourcing partner for the processing of usage statistics. Besides ScholarlyStats we will also work on integrating usage data from ScholarlyStats into SwetsWise Subscriptions for our SwetsWise customers. We welcome any feedback and suggestions for further enhancement of the ScholarlyStats service.; 10:39 AM

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Michael Cairns

Michael Cairns is currently Head of Partner and Channel Development for the publishing unit of the American Psychological Association which is a $100million scholarly, academic and educational publisher. In this role, he is responsible for all sales and marketing activities supporting the revenue base and working with current and new partners to expand APA's publishing program and mission. Michael Cairns has served as President, CEO and CRO of several brand name publishing, technology and content-centric businesses. His career includes a wide range of publishing and information products, services and B2B categories and his operating and consulting experience has largely been with brand-name companies such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Macmillan, Inc., Berlitz International, AARP, R.R. Bowker and Wolters Kluwer. Mr. Cairns has also served on boards including the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and also served as Chairman of the International ISBN Executive Committee.