Berkeley Electronic Press (BEPress) was founded as a response to the for-profit journal industry. The folks who started it weren't going to make any money until they sold it to DeGruyter (and I can't say whether they made any money off the sale). Well (Elsevier acquires bepress):
Today, Elsevier announces its acquisition of bepress. In a move entirely consistent with its strategy to pivot beyond content licensing to preprints, analytics, workflow, and decision-support, Elsevier is now a major if not the foremost single player in the institutional repository landscape. If successful, and there are some risks, this acquisition will position Elsevier as an increasingly dominant player in preprints, continuing its march to adopt and coopt open access.
The acquisition target is a company with an interesting history and product portfolio. Like SSRN, Elsevier’s last major acquisition of a standalone company, bepress was founded by academics who saw opportunities to transform scholarly communications. In both cases, they have profited richly from their vision.
Originally started by scholars at Berkeley in the fields of law and economics as Berkeley Electronic Press, bepress was first established to publish journals with improved time to publication using an innovative incentive structure to reward peer reviewers. The journals portfolio grew to 67 titles and was sold in 2011 to DeGruyter.
Today, bepress is focused not on journal publishing but on the infrastructure of scholarly communication and showcasing scholarship. When I asked him yesterday to define the company, CEO Jean-Gabriel Bankier began by saying, “We build research showcases.”
If you use Digital Commons then it sounds like you are going to be using Elsevier.
