Wellington startup Publons sold in multi-million deal

“He was just a scruffy Python slinger when I met him,” says veteran startup investor Dave Moskovitz.

The “he” in question is Andrew Preston, now probably a millionaire after his company’s recent sale (keep reading). At the time of the pair’s 2012 meeting, Mr Preston was fresh from completing a PhD in physics at Victoria University (involving some experience with the trendy Python programming language).

One of the main things Mr Preston learned at university was that the academic publishing scene is pretty backward.

“It hadn’t really changed for 350 years,” Mr Moskovitz says.

Along with fellow Victoria graduate Daniel Johnston, Mr Preston formed a company called Publons in an effort to drag things into the 21^st century (the name is a physics in-joke, standing for what the pair maintain is the smallest possible unit of publishing). Mr Moskovitz came on board as chairman and the first investor.

The new company focused on peer-review, a key element of academic publishing.

Traditionally, peer-review had been initiated by academic journals. Before publishing a paper, they would find another academic to give feedback on it and validate it. It was a relatively slow and clumsy process. And to the extent that any technology was applied, it was sometimes used for fraud. In a recent article, Nature notes that “In such cases, authors typically suggest apparently genuine reviewers for their papers, but provide bogus e-mail addresses that they or their friends control, and from which they send in their own reviews.”

Academic journals are in clover in terms of material to publish. Mr Moskovitz says academics are so keen to get published, they often pay for the privilege. But given the problems noted above, it’s often hard for them to find people willing to peer review – which doesn’t pay.

Publons solved this problem by creating an online database to help facilitate peer reviews, and to help reviewers easily track papers they and others had reviewed – making it much easier to gauge peer review activity at a glance, and for reviews to parlay it into career advancement or even tenure.

It quickly took off and, as of earlier this month, it had 150,000 peer reviewers registered and 800,000 papers on its database.

While others tried the same thing, Mr Preston says his company is the only one not affiliated with any academic journal. Its neutrality helped it prosper.

Big score
Along the way, Publons collected $300,000 while part of Wellington’s Lightning Lab business incubator in 2013. NZVIF was an early backer. And last year it did a “seven-figure” deal with independent academic publisher Sage.

The Sage deal put Publons on the radar of Clarivate Analystics, the academic publishing citation database company recently spun out of Thomson Reuters by private equity players in a $US3.55 billion deal.

Talks ensued, and Clarivate bought Publons in a deal announced last week.

Mr Moskowitz wouldn’t put a price on the on the deal, citing non-disclosure provisions but said it was “many multiples” of the money investors had put into the company so far. The deal managed notices in The Economist and The Guardian (which says Publons has become “the de facto standard for crediting peer review”).

Staying local
Publons has 16 staff, most based in Wellington where all development takes place. Mr Preston is based in London, which he says is a necessity; he calls the city “the home of academic publishing.” (Clarivate has an office in the city, although its corporate headquarters is in the US).

Mr Preston says the Wellington office will not only be maintained but also expanded. The co-founders will stay on, the better to hit earn-out targets.

Clarivate’s citation database and Publons’ peer review database are complementary he says, and new tools will be developed for publishers to tap information from both.

There is an ocean of work as the Wellington outfit helps the multinational Clarivate modernise its systems.

If recent photos are anything to go by, Mr Preston (who spoke to NBR from London) is still pretty scruffy in appearance.

But he sounds pretty smooth and Mr Moskowitz says the youngster led the successful negotiations with Clarivate.

Now that's a good peer review.