Article Excerpt:
TWST: Can we start with a little history and an overview of Ingenta?Mr. Dessain: Ingenta is a company that grew out of Bath University. So it very much comes out of the academic world. Its origins are in providing services to academic and scholarly publishers and the world of researchers who use research- oriented publications. The company was founded and came to the market in 2000 and right at the peak of dot-com boom, and in a way, the company has been very associated with that whole era. I think it is only now really moving away from those times. The company started its life by providing two services to publishers. The first service it provided was in taking content and putting it on the Web. It still does that. It still does it well. It's doing it in volume, and it has certain specialized ways of doing it. But that is now a reasonably commoditized service - just putting content on the Web. The second service, which is the heart of Ingenta, is that it enables publishers when they put content on the Web to allow subscription-based access. Now, in order to provide large-scale subscription based access, you need to solve a lot of problems. When you arrive at the Web site, you may have an individual subscription. You may have a subscription through your employer. You may be a fellow at the university. You may be working on a state or a government-funded project that has its own subscription. So the issue of multiple identities, who you are, and what are the associated rights, that is the real value that Ingenta provides to publishers and the whole area of online access to subscription content. We provided services originally to academia, and that has now spread considerably to include other professional- and research-oriented publishers. So Ingenta works with publishers such as MIT and Oxford University Press. So we work with publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. We have operations in North America based out of Boston and Providence, and operations in Europe based out of Oxford and Bath - back to where the company came from.
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