ATG Interviews Brian Hole

CEO, Ubiquity Press

By Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu> and Leah Hinds (Executive Director, Charleston Hub) <leah@charlestonlibraryconference.com>

ATG: Can you tell us a little bit about your background, and how Ubiquity Press came to be?

BH: Ubiquity was founded both from a concrete need for new publishing services and a sense that most existing publishers were not well-aligned with the values of the research and library communities.

Our origins are back in 2008, when I went back to university to do a part-time PhD in archaeology after several years working in publishing. My department had a student journal in our department that had been running for 20 years and was very highly regarded, but was limited to a small print distribution only, so it was time to take it online. At the same time, I was doing my research in India and came to realize that access to publications was still a significant issue for the greater part of the world, and it became clear that we should also go open access if we wanted to maximize the journal’s readership. In a modern context, it was also clearly indefensible to exclude more than half of the global scholarly community from “our research,” while at the same time pretending that science was all about collaboration and community.

The problem was that there were no publishers at that time really willing to support open access in the humanities, especially with an affordable APC. There were also no commercial journal hosting platforms available at a price point that worked for student and departmental-based publishing. My experience in previous roles, such as at Elsevier, was that such systems are far from trivial to build and that there was already a large amount of duplicated effort with multiple proprietary systems out there. Because of this, we decided to work with an open source platform, Open Journal Systems. Our approach was to professionalize the front end, and this worked very well. All of a sudden, the articles were getting high views and downloads and many other journals at the university began asking for similar help.

I founded the company because of this demand and the journals platform has now grown to over 800 titles around the world. Some of our core values came from this beginning — to always be 100% open access, to base our core products on open source, and to provide all services at a fair and affordable price. We similarly began publishing open access books early on due to demand in the humanities, and soon had a successful small press.

At this point, we realized that there were many institutions out there trying to do the same thing but finding it difficult, so we decided to make our platform and services available to them to run their own presses. This really took off, and we now support the open access operations of 35 university presses around the world, the majority of which were newly founded. A key mission of the company is to support the growth and diversity of university-based publishing, and we’ve very proud of having catalyzed a significant resurgence.

We added repositories to the platform when Bepress was acquired by Elsevier in 2017, as we were working closely with libraries and understood that there was now a need for a reasonably priced cloudhosted platform, based on open source to limit vendor lock-in.

One of the biggest wins over this time was that we were able to attract a really talented team, all completely dedicated to open access and open source. It’s this team and its integrity that makes us a great partner for our customers, just as much as the platform and technology.

ATG: Can you tell us how the acquisition of Ubiquity Press by De Gruyter developed? What is it about De Gruyter that made it an attractive suitor?

After ten years we found ourselves running a successful and self-sustaining business, which we felt was having a positive impact on the world. We still believed that the company had the potential for significantly more growth and impact though, and for this we needed investment to help us invest in areas such as product development and sales and marketing. We decided that we needed an investment partner with industry knowledge to help us grow, but also with aligned values.

We spent much of 2022 speaking to over 30 possible investors. We cast the net fairly wide, but did exclude certain companies where the values gap was obviously too great. In the end we decided that for many reasons De Gruyter was by far the best fit, both for us and our customers.

The deal involved De Gruyter obtaining ownership of the company, but also very importantly they also agreed to make the significant investment we were looking for to help the company continue growing and to reach its potential. Mindful of the way in which other acquisitions have often resulted in a damaging of the acquired company’s brand and effectiveness, they agreed that Ubiquity should continue to run independently and to pursue the same mission. This involved agreeing to continue our customer charter, which guarantees our commitment to open access and open source. Without this agreement, we could not have gone through with the deal.

Another key factor was that we respect De Gruyter as a company, both in terms of the people and the way they do business. We confirmed a strong cultural alignment with them in talks, and also did our due diligence into the way the company was run and would run in future. The last thing we wanted was to join a large, profit-blinkered corporation. It gave us a lot of confidence that De Gruyter will remain family-owned and independent, with no stock-market flotation or other external investor pressure. They also maintain healthy but reasonable profit margins. We knew that this would be an important factor for our community, many of whom quite fairly oppose the excessive income of the larger players, which siphon off precious institutional funding to line investor pockets.

Since the acquisition, De Gruyter have been absolutely true to their word, and we are now very happy to be moving ahead and scaling up independently but with their valuable help. They also have a very well aligned partner program for university presses that complements our open access offerings very well, so while both offerings will be independent there is also scope to offer very effective packages for customers together.

Finding such an appropriate partner was not easy, but we are very happy that the company now has a perfect long-term home, with the support it needs to continue moving forward in alignment with our vision and values.

ATG: In what ways will the De Gruyter acquisition affect Ubiquity Press’ overall governance? How will your duties as CEO be impacted?

BH: We will continue to run the company the same way under De Gruyter’s ownership. Our Partner Advisory Board, made up of customer representatives, will continue to oversee our adherence with the customer charter, which also remains unchanged.

My role and those of the senior management team stay the same as well. There have been no changes to staff (other than many new hires), and we are all committed to pursuing the company’s mission and growth.

ATG: What about your commitment to the broader research community? Will Ubiquity Press maintain its general and partner advisory boards? Will the Ubiquity Community Portal continue to operate? Can your press partners expect the same level of innovation from the Ubiquity Press platform?

BH: We have always considered ourselves a researcher-led publisher because our mission and values were informed by my experience during my PhD and my years working at the British Library. I don’t necessarily recommend simultaneously founding a company, having a family and pursuing a PhD if you like getting eight hours of sleep a night, but it really helped us to understand the needs and frustrations of researchers and the growing open science community from within.

We will be expanding our general advisory boards to help us keep and expand this focus. I finally finished the PhD, so we’re appointing several early career researchers to the board to help us chart a course that meets their needs.

We’ve now hired a larger community team, so our community portal will also be growing and providing for more interaction among our partners.

Due to the investment we’ve received, we’re now able to accelerate innovation and product development. This also enables us to double-down more on many of our values and commitments that are important for the research and library communities. For example, with a bigger team we are now able to dedicate more time to involvement in open source communities, and to developing more features for the community-owned codebases we make use of.

ATG: Are there specific ways that being part of De Gruyter will help you and the Ubiquity team be a more effective open research publisher and provider of open publishing services? And how will the acquisition impact your mission to accelerate change towards open access and open science?

Really as described above, this gives us a lot more resources to pursue our mission and be more effective. A next step in our evolution will see us enabling a lot more integration of our platform, to enable more synergy across the research lifecycle in open science. Our repositories are adding preprint functionality for example, that can integrate seamlessly with the journal platform. They are also being developed to provide fully professional storage and access to research data and content such as video for the journals and books.

ATG: Can you share some of your immediate and long-range plans and/or goals for the future?

BH: Right now, we’re completing the new hires that came with the investment and getting the expanded areas of the company such as development and sales and marketing running. Following that, our mission is to keep developing our products and services as described, and to have the greatest impact we can. We really believe that there is not only enormous potential for growth in university presses, but also a critical need for the important role they play in publishing and society. We similarly feel there is a similar need for more and better institutional repositories, to drive the sharing of open content and open science.

ATG: Is there anything else you’d like to share with the Charleston/ATG community?

BH: A great part of having an expanded team is that we now have the bandwidth to be present at a lot more events, so we look forward to seeing more of the community in Charleston going forward!

ATG: That’s great to hear, Brian. Thanks for taking the time to update us on the company and the acquisition, and we look forward to hearing more updates in the future. And hopefully to see you in Charleston!

Brian Hole is the CEO of Ubiquity, and original founder. An active researcher in the field of archaeology, he also has strong roots in the academic community. Previous roles included platform development at Elsevier and data publication at the British Library. A passionate advocate for open scholarship and changing the culture of publishing, Brian speaks regularly at conferences and workshops on these topics. Brian is based in Thessaloniki, Greece.