Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, announced today the acquisition of Newsflo. Newsflo is a London-based company that helps researchers and academic institutions to measure the wider impact of their work by tracking and analysing media coverage of their publications and findings (Update – May 2023: The startup seems to be no longer in business under this website, and we therefore deactivated the original link).
Founded in 2012 by Imperial College London physicists, Newsflo monitors and analyses the media impact of individual research papers, researchers and institutions. Currently Newsflo tracks over 55,000 English-speaking global media sources and has the technology and network to expand to non-English language media.
On the other side, Elsevier is a world-leading provider of information solutions that enhance the performance of science, health, and technology professionals, empowering them to make better decisions, deliver better care, and sometimes make groundbreaking discoveries that advance the boundaries of knowledge and human progress. Elsevier provides web-based, digital solutions — among them ScienceDirect, Scopus, Elsevier Research Intelligence and ClinicalKey — and publishes nearly 2,200 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and over 25,000 book titles, including a number of iconic reference works.
Through the ongoing integration of Mendeley with Elsevier’s existing platforms, Newsflo’s media monitoring feature will become an integrated part of the workflow of researchers publishing with Elsevier, along with tools such as the Article Recommender.
Newsflo applies this intelligence to reflect emerging trends in the academic sector and to provide relevant media alerts. Newsflo’s media monitoring capability will be integrated into the profiles of researchers using the Mendeley platform, providing individually-customised evidence of the societal impact of their research through media mentions.
Olivier Dumon, Managing Director of Research Application and Platforms at Elsevier, said: “The demonstration of societal impact is increasingly important for researchers and research departments across many areas, including the ability to secure funding and attract students. Through this acquisition we will acquire not only the technology to enable this, but also the expertise of the two founders, who will be great assets to Elsevier in further advancing our portfolio of innovative tools to support institutional leaders and researchers’ workflows and careers.”
Ben Kaube, Newsflo co-founder, said: “Joining Elsevier allows us to scale up our operation so that we can make a truly substantial impact. Our mission is to help institutions and researchers to showcase the value of their research. It’s exciting to now be able to serve millions of researchers every day, helping them to stay informed about media interest in their work and develop their profiles.”
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