On 24 October 2022, Berlin-based academic publisher De Gruyter announced its acquisition of Ubiquity, an open research publisher and service provider. Moving forward, the two companies will work together closely to advance both publishers’ mission to make academic research globally accessible and discoverable by offering excellent publishing services.
Ubiquity was founded by researchers in order to accelerate change towards OA and open science in 2012. Ubiquity publishes gold and diamond OA journals and books through its imprint Ubiquity Press, and supports 33 independent university presses with publishing services. Along with these partners, Ubiquity currently provides over 800 open access journals and more than 2,800 open access books. Ubiquity extended its services in 2021 with the launch of its institutional repositories platform, adding capacity to drive green open access and the dissemination of all research outputs, such as preprints and data.
Ubiquity bases its journal, book and repository platforms on open source, and is an active contributor to these community-managed codebases. Ubiquity’s customer charter further testifies to the company’s commitment to openness, ensuring that the organization will always publish in OA, base its platforms on open source and provide unbundled products. De Gruyter has agreed to the continuation of this charter, ensuring that Ubiquity will continue to operate according to these values and in partnership with the open community.
De Gruyter, an independent global publishing house founded in 1749 in Berlin, has been an advocate and early adopter of OA for over a decade. De Gruyter published its first OA book in 2010 and launched its first fully gold OA journal in 2013. Today, the publisher’s OA portfolio comprises more than 2,500 open access books and around 120 fully OA journals.
The Ubiquity team and CEO and founder Brian Hole will keep working from their London office and remotely to continue their successful journey of researcher-led publishing.
Read the full press release here.