Mike Groth

by Mike Groth

Despite the economic turmoil, war in Ukraine and climate change, our publishing partners and customers could look back on the past year confidently, stepping off the roller coaster ride of the pandemic to enjoy some sense of stability. It was a year of progress and adaptation where the big scholarly publishing trends, such as Open Science, sustainability, and AI, seemed to further entrench themselves in the market.

The KGL PubFactory team enjoyed another positive year with new site launches and renewals, an exciting acquisition by our parent company, some fresh faces and the return of in-person events. We spoke to PubFactory’s co-founder and VP of Client Services, José Fossi, to explore his highlights for the year.

MG: Tell us about the new PubFactory community members who have launched this past year, as well as those who have renewed on the platform.

JF: It’s so exciting to see our community expand, but it is equally satisfying to see our existing customers show their appreciation and commitment by extending their contracts with long-term renewals. And 2022 was certainly a positive year on that front.

In terms of new community members, we were delighted to welcome Bristol University Press, and its imprint Policy Press, on-board. The publisher went live last June with its new, integrated scholarly portal Bristol University Press Digital. The new site provides access to over 1,400 books and 6,000 articles from its 18 peer-reviewed journals, and more.

We were extremely pleased that Edward Elgar Publishing extended its longstanding relationship with us for an additional five years. We have been working closely with the independent publisher since 2011 and the renewal marked the launch of the upgraded Elgar Online with new PubFactory platform enhancements. Later in the year, international social sciences publisher Brill—another long-time customer—renewed with us having doubled its online business in the last six years. There were also significant contract renewals signed with Berghahn Journals, and American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) for its ebooks platform.

MG: 2022 was the year when in-person events seemed to bounce back, and publishers were finally able to mix and mingle once again. What were your favorite moments and highlights from the events calendar?

JF: While the industry is very much well-adapted to hosting and participating in virtual events, and indeed we have established and held several of our own, it was really encouraging to have in-person events return in 2022.

The KGL PubFactory team was out in force at the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Annual Meeting and it was fantastic to see my colleague Tom Beyer deliver a poster session alongside our platform partner Stuart Maxwell of Scholarly IQ to discuss how to make the most of business intelligence and analytics in an Open Access era. In addition, Tom presented at the SSP Innovation Showcase recently, where he spoke about how customers can use the PubGen module to help boost platform experience with freeform content. And finally, he moderated a fascinating debate at the Charleston Conference back in November along with our customers, Elgar and Bristol, on how technology can help publishers tackle global social challenges, particularly in the support of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.  

Meanwhile, back in the virtual world, our KGL PubFactory Virtual Series was bigger and more information-packed than ever before and included a public-facing Industry Day, with a lively discussion around OSTP and Public Access.

Looking ahead, we are thrilled to be exhibiting at the London Book Fair alongside KGL and Sheridan (come and meet us at Stand 3A12), and also look out for our Industry Breakout Session on one-stop content workflows for scholarly associations at the SSP 2023 Annual Meeting.

MG: Recently KGL PubFactory’s parent company CJK Group announced the acquisition of Allen Press. How do you anticipate this deal will have an impact on PubFactory?

I think the acquisition of Allen Press is a really significant and positive move that will benefit PubFactory and the community in a number of ways. Perhaps most significantly will be the addition of the Meridian hosting service for small, independent societies and association publishers, which will really help to grow and enrich our community. Beyond that, there are a number of new in-house services available to our customers as part of the KGL portfolio, including association and meeting management, marketing and creative services, and advertising sales.

MG: The KGL PubFactory team is growing. Which are the latest recruits to the team you are most excited about?

Recently we made two very noteworthy hires to bolster our project management team. Casey Buchta joined us last September as Senior Project Manager, bringing a wealth of experience from the Science Partner Journal (SPJ) and Human Kinetics. Samantha Fuller, who worked with Casey at SPJ and has over 10 years of academic publishing experience, joins us this month too, also in the role of Senior Project Manager. We’re excited about these two new recruits and the expertise they bring to our current and future platform customers.

MG: And finally, what are the latest platform developments our community should know about?

At the beginning of this year, we announced that we will be partnering with GetFTR—which helps to streamline access and remove barriers to research—by adding this fantastic API to our platform. One of our customers, the American Meteorological Society (AMS), is already on board and using the tool and we expect that many others in the community will follow and take full advantage of this new partnership for the benefit of their institutional users. This is just one of a number of exciting developments and enhancements we are working on and we look forward to announcing more in the near future.

José Fossi is VP of Client Services and co-founder of the KGL PubFactory platform. He oversees the breadth of the PubFactory business and focuses on operations, excellence in delivery, and the scaling of PubFactory technologies. He can be reached at info@kwglobal.com

KGL PubFactory becomes the latest platform provider to facilitate access to GetFTR as American Meteorological Society (AMS) becomes the first publisher to join GetFTR in 2023.

Boston, MA—January 20, 2023—GetFTR is designed to improve the journey from discovery to access, and to support publishers in helping their researchers quickly reach published content they are entitled to read via their institutional subscriptions. GetFTR also provides researchers with access to up-to-date open content including articles in hybrid journals.

KGL Pubfactory provides the platform for AMS journals and is the latest platform provider to come onboard. 

Mike Friedman, Senior Manager of Publishing Operations for AMS, said ”We are thrilled to offer GetFTR’s services to our institutionally based readers. The streamlined access directly to our content will save them valuable time, and make the whole discovery and accessing process much more efficient. Thanks to both GetFTR and PubFactory for making this happen so smoothly.”

Tom Beyer, Director of Platform Services for KGL Pubfactory said “We are very excited to add this capability to our platform. GetFTR is a great tool for extending the reach and access to content which is critically important for our publishers.”

“We are delighted to welcome both Pubfactory and AMS to GetFTR,” Dianne Benham, Product Lead for GetFTR, said. “The work we have done with PubFactory to get AMS on board will now ease the way for other publishers who wish to join to provide real-time entitlement checks. We would like to thank both AMS and PubFactory for their support in facilitating this relationship and look forward to working with both organizations.” 

If you would like to find out more about the service, please contact Dianne Benham at dianne@getfulltextresearch.com.

About GetFTR – www.getfulltextresearch.com  

Get Full Text Research (GetFTR) is a free-to-use solution that enables faster access for researchers to the published journal articles they need. Working on and off campus and built on trusted technology, GetFTR is inviting providers of online research services and publishers to be part of its development. 

About the American Meteorological Society  – www.ametsoc.org 

In support of the AMS Mission to advance science for the benefit of society, AMS Publications proudly provides professionals, students, and weather enthusiasts with timely and high-quality weather, water, and climate science information. AMS publishes 12 peer-reviewed scientific journals consistently ranked near the top of their fields, including the highly regarded Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), a long-standing series of meteorological monographs, and the Glossary of Meteorology. 

About KGL Pubfactory – www.pubfactory.com 

KGL PubFactory, the online hosting division of KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL), supports publishers in disseminating research globally and ensuring access when and where it is needed. The platform is content-agnostic, and home to valuable publications across the STM and SSH subject areas including journals, books, databases, and videos. As part of KGL, PubFactory is the only platform provider offering a one-stop solution spanning the beginning of the content lifecycle through to digital publication, with flexible, configurable, and scalable online hosting. 

Brainerd, MN—January 9, 2023—CJK Group, Inc. is pleased to announce that it has completed an agreement to acquire the assets of venerable print and publishing services company Allen Press, located in Lawrence, Kansas. This acquisition is unique for CJK Group in that it will supplement and expand services and capabilities to both the Sheridan print operations in addition to its KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL) content solutions company.

Allen Press originated in 1935 as a family-owned company serving a local print market and grew to incorporate a wide variety of editorial, production, marketing, and digital services tailored to the needs of independent society and association publishers.

The print facility will be renamed Sheridan Kansas, bringing the number of Sheridan’s print locations across the country to a total of ten. Work is produced offset and digitally, with a full complement of finishing equipment; back issue fulfillment, warehousing, and ancillary graphics services also offered. The plant’s central US location affords Sheridan a strategic production option for both Midwest and West Coast publishing communities with more efficient mailing and distribution. The addition of this location further broadens Sheridan’s job-share abilities and raw material procurement strength.

On the content side, Allen Press’s extensive suite of publishing services and technology solutions will be incorporated into the KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. operation, further bolstering KGL’s one-stop content proposition, which includes peer review and editorial office management, business consulting, AI-powered language analysis and copyediting, XML composition and proofing, digital and print production, and online hosting. The addition of Allen Press to the KGL portfolio will add marketing services, advertising sales, and association management to the spectrum of specialized services for scholarly publishers.

CEO of CJK Group Chris Kurtzman remarked, “Allen Press has long held a unique and highly respected place in the print and publishing market, offering exceptional front-end capabilities as well as creative and marketing solutions, in addition to high-quality print and distribution. We see this as a perfect fit for both our Sheridan and KGL families. The entrepreneurial customer-centric culture at Allen Press is a mirror reflection of our own, something we look for and place a very high value on when we bring companies such as Allen Press into the fold. We are looking forward to bringing streamlined performance and additional capabilities to both our existing and new customers.”

CJK Group, Inc. represents one of the largest printing and publishing services organizations in the country, continuing to grow both organically and through acquisitions. At the core of the CJK Group strategy is investment in employees, equipment, technologies, and thoughtful acquisitions that mirror the same principles and values that all CJK Group companies possess. 

About CJK Group, Inc.
Headquartered in Brainerd, MN, CJK Group, Inc. is an international portfolio of print, publishing service, and technology/information solutions companies.

The Sheridan family of print companies provides a wide array of full-service solutions for books, magazines, journals, catalogs, and commercial print. Sheridan print facilities are located in Brainerd, MN, Brimfield, OH, Chelsea, MI, Grand Rapids, MI, Hanover, NH, Hanover, PA, Lawrence, KS, Madison, WI, Random Lake, WI, and Versailles, KY.

KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. offers content services such as editorial, peer review, management consulting, learning solutions, and online hosting to the journal, educational publishing, and eLearning markets. KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. content service facilities are located in Lawrence, KS and Richmond, VA in the US; Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai, and New Delhi in India; and London in the United Kingdom.

Tweddle Group serves the OEM industry with custom support solutions and is headquartered in Clinton Township, MI, with European and Asian headquarters in Italy, Belgium, and China. For more information, visit www.cjkgroup.com

Media Contact: Susan Parente, CJK Group Publications Marketing Manager, susan.parente@cjkgroup.com

Boston, MA—November 29, 2022—KGL PubFactory, the online hosting division of KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL), has announced another longstanding customer contract renewal, this time with international social science publisher, Brill. Having doubled its web business over the past six years, Brill will continue to take advantage of the latest enhancements of the PubFactory platform in an extended relationship.

Brill publishes more than 2,000 books and reference works per year, in addition to almost 600 journals—including 42 fully Open Access titles—mainly in the humanities, social sciences, and international law. Brill has expanded in recent years through acquisitions of Dutch biological sciences publisher, Wageningen Academic Publishers, and German humanities publisher, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage.

As a flagship PubFactory customer hosting both its books and journals, Brill has doubled its online sales on brill.com over the course of the partnership, integrated its business intelligence with PubFactory’s IntelWorks reporting and analytics service, and been a leading user of the PubGen module—migrating the Brill #HumanitiesMatter Blog onto the platform as formatted and searchable content to enhance the user experience. The next phase will see Brill moving its reference works and primary source materials to the PubFactory platform.

Bas Baas, VP of Technology at Brill, commented: “As an independent HSS publisher of both books and journals, we appreciate the great fit with the PubFactory platform and community, along with the high quality of service we’ve received. The team have eagerly supported Brill’s ambitious business growth with new opportunities to enrich our site and advanced tools to analyze our market. We look forward to this next chapter of innovation and expansion in our nearly 340-year history.”

José Fossi, VP of Client Services for KGL PubFactory added: “Brill is one of our largest and most pioneering publishers, with a willingness to experiment with new technologies and business models. We are pleased to provide a best-in-class customer and user experience, and are excited to continue growing together.”

KGL’s end-to-end proposition for scholarly publishers includes business consulting, editorial and peer review solutions, AI-powered language analysis and copyediting, XML composition and proofing, digital and print production, and online hosting. The PubFactory platform hosts over 1,300 journals and 300,000 books, numerous databases, and reference works.

About Brill
Founded in 1683, Brill is a publishing house with a rich history and a strong international focus. Headquartered in the Netherlands, with offices in Germany, Austria, the USA and Asia, Brill’s publications focus on the Humanities and Social Sciences, International Law and selected areas in the Sciences. Brill publications also include several major imprints with a distinguished history of publishing high quality and successful titles. Brill publishes more than 2,000 books and reference works per year in both print and electronic format, in addition to almost 600 journal titles—including 42 fully Open Access titles. For more information, please visit brill.com.

About KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL) is the premier industry provider of editorial, peer review, production, management consulting, online hosting, and transformative solutions for every stage of the content lifecycle. KGL serves the journal, educational publishing, and eLearning markets from content creation through distribution of print and digital products. A division of CJK Group, Inc., KGL unites the content and technology expertise of Cenveo Publisher Services and Cenveo Learning with Sheridan Journal Services, Sheridan PubFactory and now KWF Consulting and KWF Editorial. The combined company brings over 200 years of experience serving the publishing market and is powered by state-of-the-art, intelligent automated solutions and delivery platforms including Smart Suite and PubFactory. For more information, please visit www.kwglobal.com.

Contact: Mike Groth, Director of Marketing, KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd., mike.groth@kwglobal.com