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HighWire, welcome to the MPS family

Frequently Asked Questions

MPS successfully completed the acquisition of HighWire Press on July 1, 2020. Both MPS and HighWire share a passion for solving complex problems through technology and innovation with an immense focus on customer satisfaction. With HighWire by its side, MPS will move forward to Make Learning Smarter and serve the community with leading technology and services. The announcement can be found here.

What has happened?
Who is HighWire?
How big is HighWire and where it is based?
Why is this important for MPS?
What is HighWire’s ownership history and links with Stanford University?
Why is MPS acquiring HighWire?
How many customers does HighWire have?
What products/services does HighWire provide?
What are HighWire’s key differentiators?
What are HighWire’s future areas of focus?
Will the HighWire brand name change?
What has happened?
  • MPS Limited has acquired HighWire Press, Inc. and its subsidiaries.
Who is HighWire?
  • Founded in 1995 by Stanford University, HighWire Press was established during the inception of the Internet. From its beginning, HighWire has been a leader in the industry. Its technology, which remains at the forefront of digital knowledge management, provides customers with market-leading capabilities.
  • HighWire is one of the independent technology providers in the scholarly information and communication industry that offers societies, academies, associations, and publishers a full suite of products and services that span the publishing cycle.
  • Having supported publishers via millions of articles, issues, and publications since its founding, HighWire has thrived largely as a result of its highly proven, modular, and scalable technology, coupled with strong relationships with its publisher partners and within the publishing and technology industries.
  • HighWire’s current focus is on operational excellence, pragmatic innovation, and enriching the customer experience.
  • The following milestones demonstrate some of HighWire’s past accomplishments:
    • HighWire launched the first at-scale digital publishing platform in the industry.
    • HighWire was an early partner and continue to collaborate closely with Google to make HighWire -hosted content the most discoverable in the scholarly publishing sector.
    • HighWire acquired Semantico, a complementary platform provider, in 2016, increasing its overall technology innovation capabilities and expanding additional platform offerings.
    • In 2017, HighWire launched an open, comprehensive, end-to-end publishing platform known as the Intelligent Platform.
    • HighWire won the 2018 CODiE Award for its analytics platforms.
How big is HighWire and where it is based?
  • HighWire has approximately 90 full-time global employees, based out of Los Gatos (“Silicon Valley” California), Brighton (England) and Belfast (Northern Ireland).
Why is this important for MPS?
  • The acquisition brings together two companies that defined modern scholarly publishing technology and will accelerate the pace of technology innovation for the industry.
  • Together, MPS and HighWire:
    • bring together some of the sharpest minds with the deepest institutional knowledge in the scholarly publishing market.
    • can convene a broad community of societies and publishers to identify, discuss, and address existing challenges and new opportunities.
    • will use their unique skillset and scale to develop the technology critical to a rapidly transforming industry.
    • can mutually expand their user base into new geographical territories and adjacent industry verticals.
What is HighWire’s ownership history and links with Stanford University?
  • HighWire was born out of Stanford 25 years ago and has retained close ties during that time, with its data center based on campus up until July 2020.
  • In 2014, Stanford University entered into an agreement with Accel-KKR to transfer all of the assets constituting the HighWire business to a newly formed entity, HighWire Press, Inc. Accel-KKR maintained majority ownership of HighWire, while Stanford University retained a minority ownership stake.
  • Stanford’s strategic input has been limited over the last few years, and following close they will no longer own a stake in HighWire or retain a seat on the board.
Why is MPS acquiring HighWire?
  • Through the HighWire Press acquisition, MPS expects to strengthen positioning in the Academic and STM community as a leader in making research smarter.
  • HighWire’s vision of “Connecting the best minds to the most people” aligns with MPS’ vision to “Make Learning Smarter”.
  • With 25 years’ experience in the scholarly publishing industry, HighWire brings deep insight that will enable MPS to enhance its current product portfolio and better serve larger set of customers with a wider portfolio of platforms and services.
  • Like MPS, HighWire was the first content delivery platform company to serve its community and we would like to bring back its strong focus on innovation and product leadership.
How many customers does HighWire have?
  • HighWire Press currently has 145 customers, predominantly in the STEM space. Key players include medRxiv / bioRxiv (via Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and BMJ); Springer; Cochrane Library; Oxford University Press; The National Academy of Sciences; Society for Neuroscience, American Association for the Advancement of Science; American Association for Cancer Research; American Academy of Pediatrics; American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology; McGraw-Hill Education; IOS Press; and American Academy of Neurology.
What products/services does HighWire provide?
  • HighWire Press provides an end-to-end platforms and consulting services for the publishing lifecycle, based upon a modular approach and a micro-services architecture which enables rapid integration with third-party applications.
  • HighWire product stack is based across four main areas, with Hosting as the core offering.
  • HighWire Hosting
    The strength of HighWire Hosting through Scolaris lies in its open, interoperable approach, meaning we can easily integrate third-party systems, standards and technologies. This gives HighWire the unique power to create a hosting platform that is configured to your expanding and changing needs. Scolaris is its next-generation hosting platform, and was created specifically to support different types of content delivered in a variety of formats, allowing customers to go beyond the standard journal format.

    • The platform supports journals, blogs, news, video and other content types, and provides for creation of landing pages for those content types as well as display for individual items such as chapters and articles.
    • It also provides a unified home page for all content, with a publisher-driven design that will showcase all of the publisher’s content and provide seamless navigation to all the content and parts of the site.
    • The platform has robust searching and browsing capabilities that allow users to navigate through subject or other taxonomies (e.g. MeSH) as well as search directly for terms or topics of interest and by specific attributes of the content, such as by author.
  • HighWire Analytics
    HighWire award-winning analytics tools, Impact Vizor and Usage Vizor, give deep insights into the effectiveness of a publishers’ program without the need to identify users. Impact Vizor evaluates the citation performance of published articles, sections, and rejected content. Usage Vizor enables visualization of trends and patterns in article, institutional and turnaway usage. This allows customers to slice-and-dice usage and thereby micro-target communities based on shared interests, ensuring they promote the right content to your community.
  • HighWire Submissions
    HighWire Submissions platform Benchpress simplifies and streamlines the manuscript submissions process, helping publishers increase efficiency, decrease costs, and dramatically reduce time to publication. Authors, reviewers, Editors, editorial and production staff, and external service providers can submit manuscripts and reviews, update manuscript records, and track workflow efficiency through one central online tool. This technology also underpins our preprint repositories, bioRxiv and medRxiv.
  • HighWire Identity
    HighWire Identity platform SAMS Sigma lets publishers keep control of your content without compromising accessibility, giving readers an intuitive and seamless user experience while preventing access to those without permission. It provides seamless single-sign-on access so that users don’t have to repeatedly sign in when switching between resources, while also making it easy for publishers to gain critical user insight into who is accessing their content and how.
What are HighWire’s key differentiators?
  • Platforms Architecture:
    A key differentiator is HighWire’s approach to platform extension through integration with third parties. Because HighWire operates as a service-oriented architecture supported by microservices, the platform directly facilitates the development of new third-party integrations as new microservice end points. Sophisticated tools and services—whether for commercial purposes such as advertising and UI optimization, or research-communication purposes such as code execution—are increasingly available from third parties and do not need to be reinvented by your platform partner. Integration offers the advantage of speed and standardization.
  • Industry Partnerships:
    Another unique HighWire differentiator is its close relationship with Google and Google Scholar. The HighWire Product Strategy team meets with Google on a regular basis not only to ensure that all sites are being properly indexed, but also to maximize the presence of HighWire hosted content in the Google search engine results. HighWire worked with Google pioneering Google Scholar and, in the ensuing years, has continued to work with them for new features and functions such as enhanced indexing, off-campus activated subscriber access (CASA), mobile Quick Abstracts, and more. Highlights of the Google/HighWire Partnership Initiatives from the past 12 months include:

    • CASA—Campus-Activated Subscriber Access, to make it transparent for off-campus users to gain access to subscribed content.
    • Quick Abstracts—Improve speed of viewing content in Google Scholar search results.
    • LinkBoost—Techniques and new software to improve journals’ ranking and visibility in search results.
    • PDF Re-titling—PDF processing to improve the visibility of article titles in Google Web Search.
What are HighWire’s future areas of focus?
  • Looking into the future, some of the areas in which HighWire will focus our efforts:
    1. Plan S, where HighWire will continue to lead alongside our publishers and partners.
    2. Furthering personalization to enable algorithmic tailoring to automate links to content items that are of interest to a user, driving discoverability, and opening up new advertising and revenue opportunities.
    3. Screen-less search, to cater to the growing 300 million millennial users of voice search.
    4. Improved analytics tools, offering even deeper content insights, faster indexing, and improved accuracy to help drive our publishers’ data-based decisions.
Will the HighWire brand name change?
  • No. HighWire has an incredibly positive brand perception and the integration team will work to develop future plans to leverage that.

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