LOS GATOS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Scholarly publishing technology provider, HighWire, today announced that John Sack, Founding Director, has been appointed to the board of directors.
John Sack started HighWire Press in 1995 alongside Michael Keller, Vice Provost for Libraries & Technology & Learning at Stanford University Libraries. Since its founding, HighWire has led the evolution of digital publishing, providing the scholarly publishing community with innovative technology and market-leading capabilities.
During John’s 25-year tenure, HighWire has become a strong and profitable company backed by Stanford University and leading Silicon Valley private equity firm Accel-KKR, who acquired a stake in the organization in 2014. Over the last five years, Accel-KKR has funded almost $20M to enhance HighWire’s infrastructure, which now provides the most current, the most reliable and the fastest technology hosting service in the industry.
Park Durrett, Partner at Accel-KKR said: “We recognize that John’s expertise and thought leadership have been major contributors to the company’s longstanding success as a strategic technology partner to our customers across the industry. John is a natural choice for the HighWire board, due to his long-term commitment to furthering the accessibility of scientific, technical and medical content through advanced technology.”
Michael Keller, Vice Provost for Libraries & Technology & Learning at Stanford University Libraries said: “John and I established HighWire over two decades ago, in the early years of the web, during which fundamental changes occurred enabling high functioning web content, making academic journal content more easily accessed, discovered and interpreted. Today, HighWire continues to evolve with new considerations such as the impact of mobile-first use cases, the importance of trust and security, the growth of Open Access and the Plan S initiative, and the rising importance of A.I., text mining and machine learning. What has not changed during that time is HighWire’s commitment to empowering scholarly publishers in their mission of disseminating learning, empowering readers and researchers, and amplifying knowledge across the globe. I cannot think of a better fit than John to assume a position on our board as we look to continue to inform the future of scholarly publishing.”
John Sack, Founding Director at HighWire said: “Since HighWire’s launch of the industry’s first large-scale web-based scholarly journal 25 years ago, I have taken tremendous pride in our accomplishments and I am excited to continue to have the opportunity to expand my contribution to HighWire and the scholarly publishing industry. We at HighWire are deeply focused on the next wave of innovation that will prepare our publishers for a successful future in 2020 and beyond. I look forward to working with our board of directors, our very talented HighWire team members and our fantastic community of publishers to continue building on what we have achieved together.”
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About HighWire
HighWire is a global provider of digital publishing solutions and platform expertise across all aspects of the publishing life cycle, including content management and hosting, e-commerce, analytics, access and identity management, manuscript submission and tracking.
Born out of Stanford University, HighWire is backed by Stanford and private equity firm Accel-KKR, recently listed as the top founder-friendly investors for entrepreneurial partnership. This combination of deep digital understanding, academic expertise and strong financial backing makes HighWire the technology partner of choice for world-leading commercial and academic publishers.
For more information, please visit highwirepress.com and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
About Accel-KKR
Accel-KKR is a technology-focused investment firm with over $9 billion in capital commitments. The firm focuses on software and IT-enabled businesses well-positioned for top-line and bottom-line growth. At the core of Accel-KKR’s investment strategy is a commitment to developing strong partnerships with the management teams of its portfolio companies and a focus on building value through significant resources available through the Accel-KKR network. Accel-KKR focuses on middle-market companies and provides a broad range of capital solutions including buyout capital, minority-growth investments, and credit alternatives. Accel-KKR also invests across a wide range of transaction types including private company recapitalizations, divisional carve-outs and going-private transactions. Accel-KKR is headquartered in Menlo Park with additional offices in Atlanta and London. For more information, please visit accel-kkr.com.
About Stanford University Libraries
The Stanford University Libraries is more than a cluster of libraries; it connects people with information by providing diverse resources and services to the academic community. The Libraries include more than 20 individual libraries across campus, each with a world-class collection of books, journals, films, maps, databases, and more. The Stanford Digital Library is one of the most advanced digital libraries in the world with extensive digitization programs for books, manuscripts, maps, 3d objects, images, audio, video, historical software, and data files. Library experts in search, digital curation, digital humanities, computational social science, and digital preservation work hand-in-glove with students, faculty and research centers to build next generation services and applications as well as research corpora.
