Symplectic joins with new Macmillan Digital Science division
07 December 2010
Macmillan Publishers Ltd today announced the launch of Digital Science (http://www.digital-science.com/), a new division of the company that will focus on providing world-class software tools and services to scientists, managers and funders with the ultimate aim of making research more productive through the use of technology.
The new business will combine Macmillan's in-house capabilities with external expertise from a range of partners, and the first partners announced today are SureChem, BioData and Symplectic.
The activities of Digital Science will build on the reputation for editorial and technological excellence of its sister company, Nature Publishing Group (NPG), but will focus on technology-based solutions for research rather than scientific content.
The Digital Science team is led by Timo Hannay, former publishing director of nature.com.
"Research is becoming more and more digitally enabled and hence more productive," says Timo Hannay, Managing Director of Digital Science, "but the gap between the potential opportunity and the current state of the art is still wide. For example, we still have better tools for managing our personal music and photo collections than we have for managing, tracking and mining professional scientific information. At Digital Science we want to help change that."
Daniel Hook, Managing Director of Symplectic, says:
"Symplectic's team is delighted to be one of the founding partners of Digital Science. Our expertise in providing publication management tools for academics and research institutions will complement the analysis and research tools created by the other partners, and all our work will benefit from the support of a company that has always been a pioneer in scientific information."
For more information on Digital Science, and its partner companies and products, visit www.digital-science.com
Symplectic's flagship product "Elements" helps researchers save time in a culture of increasing administrative demands and provides institutions with high quality data. Symplectic Elements automatically tracks the published contributions of academics and integrates with other systems, such as those for grant management and proposals. It simplifies preparation for research assessment, supports in-depth reporting and strategic planning through the use of bibliometrics, and significantly improves the use of institutional repositories. Digital Science acquired an equity stake in Symplectic in December 2010.
SureChem, Inc. is a scientific text-mining company that specialises in automatically extracting chemical information from large content collections. Its web portal provides a quick, cost-effective means to search the world's patents for chemical structures and names. Its technology is also used to annotate chemical terms in the scientific journals hosted on nature.com. The company was acquired by Macmillan in December 2009 and it is now part of Digital Science.
BioData, Ltd. provides flexible, affordable laboratory management systems for bench scientists and lab administrators. Its main service is an innovative web-based application that enables small and large research groups alike to stay organised without resorting to more expensive, inflexible enterprise software systems. Digital Science acquired an equity stake in BioData in December 2010.
