Confirmed: Elsevier Has Bought Mendeley For $69M-$100M To Expand Its Open, Social Education Data Efforts | TechCrunch

Educational publisher Elsevier is diving deeper into the world of open and social educational data: it has bought Mendeley, the London/New York-based provider of a platform for academics and organizations to share research and collaborate with others via a social network. The terms of the deal have not been publicly disclosed but we understand it is for a sum between $69 million and $100 million. We first broke the news of this deal when it was still being negotiated, in January. The acquisition will heat up competition between Elsevier and other large publishers moving into ed-tech, among them Thomson Reuters, which owns EndNote, a competitor to Mendeley. Mendeley is both a technology/platform acquisition as well as an acqui-hire for Elsevier. CEO Victor Henning, one of the three PhD co-founders of Mendeley, tells us in an interview that all of Mendeley’s 50 staff are coming over to Elsevier, and Henning will become VP of strategy for the company — a sign that Elsevier may be gearing up for more activity and possibly acquisitions in this space.  Olivier Dumon, MD of academic and government research markets at Elsevier, says that the company does not plan to merge Mendeley with existing Elsevier products that once used to compete against it, such as Scopus, 'but we will integrate it better.'  Elsevier notes that in some regards it’s been working with Mendeley since 2009. 'Elsevier has referred users to Mendeley, invited Mendeley to build apps on ScienceDirect using its open APIs, and sponsored Mendeley’s Science Online London conferences on Open Science,' the company said in a statement on the acquisition.  Mendeley — which was founded in 2008 and has raised just under $12 million in funding from investors including Access Industries, Passion Capital, and Tom Glocer – will keep running both its main platform as well as its Institutional Edition, aimed at helping universities and other large organizations track research and what’s being read in real time. Mendeley currently has 2.3 million users on its platform (up from 2.1 million in January), as well as 24 'high profile' institutions across North America, Europe and Asia. The plan is to expand the amount of free services offered across those, such as doubling the amount of storage for individuals to 2 gigabytes.  It will also keep its API free and open to use: that API today is used by some 300 apps, up from 260 in January.  Henning says Mendeley will continue to source data from different places — not just focus on what’s published or owned by Elsevier. 'If people want to source the latest research on neurobiology, it wouldn’t make sense to limit this,' said Henning. 'Elsevier will help us by enriching our content, but when it comes to other publishers it will also increase the transit routes into them ...'"