Blackwell Publishing Signs New Contract with Atypon; Move Aims to Grow Online Journals Platform, Blackwell Synergy.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. & OXFORD, England -- Blackwell Publishing has signed a new contract with Atypon Systems to renew its license of Literatum, Atypon's e-publishing software platform, and the hosting service that currently powers Blackwell Synergy (http://www.blackwell-synergy.com) The new three-year contract will allow room for considerable growth of Synergy and will ensure that Blackwell continues to serve the diverse needs of the scholarly community.

Blackwell Synergy is established as the journals platform of choice for millions of researchers, students, professors, librarians and practitioners across a broad range of subject areas; from astronomy to xenotransplantation, and from pediatrics to political science. As the world's leading society publisher, Blackwell Publishing has partnerships with more than 600 international scholarly and professional societies and provides access to their journals on the Synergy platform.

"Our partnership has been very successful in delivering growth through Synergy, both in terms of the increasing number of journals that Blackwell publishes and in the expanding reach of those journals -- with ever more libraries and readers accessing the content worldwide," said Georgios Papadopoulos, Atypon CEO. "We're excited about building on that success and growing our relationship with Blackwell to explore new technologies that will allow Synergy to demonstrate what is possible for scholarly electronic publishing."

Atypon has been the technology partner for Blackwell Synergy since 2001. With the new contract Blackwell is extending the role of Atypon to include responsibility for all aspects of software and hardware and has increased the development budget for the duration of the agreement to resource plans for new functionality and to help reach new markets.

"It is clear that Atypon's Literatum platform surpasses its peers in technology and functionality," said Gordon Tibbitts, President of Blackwell Publishing Inc. "In an age when online delivery of research is becoming the norm and with continuous developments in such areas as backfile digitization, search engines, and library management tools, it's essential for us to have an innovative and reliable partner like Atypon to work with."

Librarians and scholars using Blackwell Synergy can expect excellent service and continued improvements in functionality and delivery of Blackwell's premier online journals collection.

About Atypon

Since 1996, Atypon Systems, Inc. has focused on providing software and services to the information industry.

Atypon offers a suite of electronic publishing software and related services for scholarly publishers and other content providers. Atypon's Literatum platform powers major websites such as Blackwell Synergy, Annual Reviews, the University of California Press. In all there are more than 60 publishers and 500 societies that publish their content using Literatum. Researchers everywhere experience the benefits of Literatum every time they link from a citation to an article through CrossRef, since Literatum is the technology behind CrossRef as well.

Other Atypon services include PDFplus, which dynamically adds links to PDFs, and LINKplus, a full service XML linking solution for publishers. Additional Atypon technologies include custom publishing software solutions, auto-classification and knowledge discovery products, and Internet marketing tools to help publishers use their online presence to grow.

The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and maintains an office in Oxford as well as a sales office in New York, NY. For more information on Atypon Systems, please visit http://www.atypon.com.

About Blackwell Publishing

Blackwell Publishing is the world's leading society publisher, partnering with more than 600 academic and professional societies. Blackwell publishes over 750 journals and 600 text and reference books annually, across a wide range of academic, medical, and professional subjects. The company remains independent with over 900 staff members in offices in the US, UK, Australia, China, Denmark, Germany, and Japan. Blackwell's mission as an expert publisher is to create long-term partnerships with our clients that enhance learning, disseminate research, and improve the quality of professional practice. For more information on Blackwell Publishing, please visit http://www.blackwellpublishing.com or http://www.blackwell-synergy.com.