Aries Systems Corporation, a leading technology workflow solutions provider to the scholarly publishing community, in partnership with Elsevier, a global leader in information and analytics, is pleased to announce the opportunity for editors, reviewers, and authors to choose to self-report their gender identity, race and ethnicity within Aries’ manuscript submission and peer review tracking system, Editorial Manager® (EM). This data will enable Aries’ customers to design data-informed action plans and measure progress to improve diversity across journal editorial processes and drive greater equity in publishing and research more broadly.

Aries and Elsevier have partnered to develop an application programming interface (API) to enable the integration of standardized schemas for self-reported gender identity, race and ethnicity (GRE) data. The GRE schemas are those developed collaboratively and endorsed in April this year by the Joint commitment for action on inclusion and diversity in publishing, a collective of 52 publishers led by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

The goal was to develop publisher-agnostic architecture for GRE data collection in a customer’s EM environment that eliminates the need for any individual Aries customer to build its own diversity data system, while simultaneously enabling GRE data reporting combined with other EM data from the customer. The publisher-agnostic model, shared with the Joint commitment collective, further supports any publisher using any editorial management platform that chooses to similarly implement the common schemas. This approach offers the potential for global analysis and benchmarking across a shared set of anonymized self-reported GRE data. Aries’ product roadmap, which will be shared in greater detail at the upcoming Editorial Manager User Group (EMUG) meeting, includes work that will offer various reporting capabilities to customers, providing invaluable insight for publishers to take further action around reducing bias and ensuring inclusivity.

“Aries is proud to collaborate on such an important global effort around diversity, inclusion, and equity within the publishing community,” said Nathan Westgarth, VP of Product Management Aries. “We are excited to be able to offer our technology and connection points to help solve for, and develop new standards in, the collective effort to overcome inequity in research related to underrepresentation and bias along gender, race and ethnicity dimensions.”

Dr. Holly Falk-Krzesinski, Chair of the Joint Commitment Data Questions Subgroup and Co-chair of Elsevier’s Gender Equity Taskforce and VP of Research Intelligence, said: “We aim to drive diversity and inclusion in research through an evidence-based approach, using data to inform a coordinated set of actions. The growing internationalization of research means that publishers share common stakeholder groups and supporting research equity globally necessitates consistent diversity data.”

BibliU, provider of a Learning Enablement platform, today announced details of its Series B funding. The company has raised the first tranche of $15M led by its current investors with participation from new investors. The funds are targeted for expansion in the U.S. market, including new product development, additional publisher partnerships and further investments in sales and marketing.

All existing institutional Series A investors – Stonehage Fleming, Oxford Science Enterprises, Guinness Ventures, and Nesta Impact Investments – participated in the round. Richard Hill, Head of Direct Investments at Stonehage Fleming, joins the BibliU board of directors in a newly created position.

“Since our initial investment in 2020, BibliU has experienced tremendous growth – both in the U.K. market, where half of the nation’s higher education students now have access to content through the BibliU platform, and in the U.S. market, where universities and colleges are replacing legacy bookstore models with BibliU’s digital-first solution for content,” said Richard Hill, Head of Direct Investments, Stonehage Fleming. “We’re excited to increase our investment in BibliU and by the growth opportunity BibliU has created. We also believe BibliU is delivering significant impact not only through substantially reducing the costs of textbooks and course materials, but also by increasing student engagement and improving learning outcomes for students. This is an important aspect for our investors.”

BibliU addresses long-standing pain points in Higher Education that directly impact student success. Even those students with full financial aid packages that cover tuition, room and board, do not anticipate hidden costs such as textbooks and course materials. These expenses can derail a college education. Sixty-five percent of students in the U.S. admit to not buying their course content due to cost, while similar research from BibliU found that 70 percent of students in the U.K. have skipped buying their textbooks and learning materials. 

The BibliU study also found that more than a third of students (35 percent) said they could not afford to buy their textbooks.Since digital content equalizes socio-economic disparities and students gain access to the required learning materials from day one, BibliU is helping colleges and universities promote diversity, equity and inclusion.

During its 2021 fiscal year, BibliU achieved 236 percent growth in recognized revenue. The company officially launched its Universal Learning solution, which aggregates digital content from thousands of publishers and OER (open educational resources) sources on one platform for one low price, per student, per class. Reception from the higher education market was positive, enabling BibliU to welcome new clients such as Wichita State University of Applied Sciences and Technology, Jackson College, and Dublin’s Trinity College to the platform.

BibliU Co-Founder and CEO, Dave Sherwood, said, “We’re excited to announce our successful Series B, which will power our growth over the coming years. We are working with an outstanding group of investors. This funding will enable BibliU to develop additional technology that further automates content management for publishers, streamline the complexities for institutions associated with managing learning content, and – most of all – support our clients’ goals to advance student success in an equitable manner.”

BibliU Board Chair, Mark Whitby, commented, “BibliU’s global growth has been impressive – in particular the company’s expansion in the U.S. market. Tranche 1 of Series B will enable the company to further fuel and accelerate this growth, whilst enabling institutions around the world to make content more accessible and affordable to their students.”

Nick Dixon-Clegg, Principal, Oxford Science Enterprises, said, “Oxford Science Enterprises is delighted to invest in BibliU’s Series B, having invested in and supported the company since 2017. We are impressed by the growth being delivered by simultaneously solving problems for students, higher education institutions and publishers. We are excited to support BibliU as it continues to grow revenue and deliver its mission to expand access in the U.S. and beyond,” said.

Hugo Vaux, Fund Manager, Guinness Ventures, shared, “BibliU has achieved impressive levels of growth and continues to welcome top institutions as new clients. This funding round puts BibliU in an even greater position to develop their proposition further and bring their Universal Learning solution to more institutions and students worldwide.”

Lisa Barclay, Executive Director of Investment, Nesta Impact Investments, said, “Through BibliU we have seen how tremendous commercial growth has come hand in hand with social impact as hundreds of thousands of university students gain access to their course materials at low or no cost. A study has shown that access to BibliU improves students’ learning outcomes. Nesta is excited to provide further investment to enable BibliU’s continued growth and impact, particularly in closing the gap between students from more disadvantaged backgrounds and their better off peers.”

Cloud-based software company Overleaf has reached 10 million users in 189 countries around the world, thanks to strong and sustained user growth among university academics, students, research institutions and industry.

The 10 million user milestone has been achieved just five months after Overleaf reached its nine millionth, and well ahead of the company’s 10th birthday in December 2022.

Part of Digital Science, Overleaf enables its users to collaboratively write, edit and publish scientific documents, with an editing tool that utilises the open-sourced LaTeX (pronounced either LAH-tek or LAY-tek) document preparation system.

This service assists academics, students, and researchers in industry to effectively and efficiently collaborate, publish and share their work, helping to make science and research faster, more accessible and more transparent.

Overleaf is the world’s market leader in this collaboration technology and typically has more than 400,000 active users of its editing services every day.

“I want to thank our worldwide community of 10 million users for their enormous support,” says John Hammersley, Co-founder and CEO of Overleaf.

“To have started the company in 2012 with just a handful of users, and seeing that handful become thousands within months — that was an exciting feeling. But to now see our small company achieve 10 million users, that is beyond any of our expectations.

“We’re excited that there’s been such huge growth in the uptake of our online editor. More than ever we’re achieving our mission of helping academics, students and those in industry to collaborate and bring their research results to the world.

“What I’m especially pleased about is that our Overleaf users have grown into a supportive, global community, in which the end result is better, faster, more accessible, and above all more collaborative research,” Dr Hammersley says.

The benefits of Overleaf’s editing tools have been highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which key scientific research has been written up on Overleaf and then released into the world.

“This was especially critical during the early stages of the pandemic, such as the rapid production of a paper on the effectiveness of mask wearing against COVID-19, which was made possible in part through the authors’ use of Overleaf,” Dr Hammersley says.

“This is just one way in which Overleaf can have an important impact on our world — and there will be millions of other users out there who are also making an important contribution to their field and to society.”

A quick overview of Overleaf:

• 10 million individual users
• 189 countries represented
• More than 6800 universities with students, faculty and staff using Overleaf
• More than 2000 companies and other research institutions
• 11 million collaborations
• 87 million projects

“These amazing statistics show a bright future ahead for research collaboration,” says Overleaf’s Chief Commercial Officer, Mary Anne Baynes.

“While those most represented in our Overleaf community are typically from computer science, engineering and technology, mathematics and physics backgrounds, we’re proud to see that our community has expanded beyond the traditional STEM fields — we now have economists, linguists, logicians and more using Overleaf every day.

“The diversity of our community continues to motivate us to explore new ways of making the collaborative authoring experience even easier. We are also working to ensure that Overleaf is more accessible to people with disabilities,” Ms Baynes says.