Elsevier, the leading global provider of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services, announced today the acquisition of Atira, a provider of software and tools that help academic institutions and researchers manage and improve their research outcomes. Atira complements Elsevier’s SciVal by expanding the scope of data to report on research activities across an academic institution, and by broadening the range of tools and dashboards to analyse those data.
“Universities, research institutes and funding bodies increasingly want to have a clear and holistic view of their research inputs, throughputs and outputs” said Nick Fowler, Elsevier’s Managing Director, Academic and Government Institutions. “Atira’s software and tools help these institutions get an up-to-date and dynamic picture of their funding sources, research groups, collaborations, publications, citations, and commercial activities. This information helps them to focus and manage resources in order to achieve their desired research outcomes.”
Atira’s main product, Pure, is a flexible research information system that enables the planning, evaluation and reporting of research activities. Pure accesses, extracts, incorporates and normalizes data from internal data sources such as human resources, finance and grant awards systems, from research projects’ progress reports, from subscribed datasets such as Scopus and from other proprietary and public datasets, to enable a complete picture of the research enterprise. Pure makes it easy to aggregate, process and visualize these disparate data sources into dashboards and tools, enabling research leaders to monitor and manage their institutions’ research activities and to identify opportunities for improvement, e.g., to win more grants, retain strong performers, and demonstrate impact to attract funding and talent. Funding bodies and government departments also have an increasing thirst to coll ect, evaluate and analyze data. Pure’s tools help support this purpose by helping universities submit data, for example, to national assessment exercises such as the UK’s Research Excellence Framework.
“Atira and Elsevier both aim to provide quality information that helps institutions and researchers monitor and manage their research outcomes” said Thomas Jørgensen, Director of Atira. “We are excited to join Elsevier because by leveraging their global reach we can make our solutions available to more academic and government institutions around the world more quickly, while continuing to serve our current markets.”
Atira is a Danish company founded in 2002 and operating in Northern Europe. Its technical domain is computer science and software engineering with a focus on server-side software architecture and systems integration. Financial details of the acquisition are not being disclosed.
