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Friday, September 15, 2006

Knovel's free content

KnowledgeSpeak has interviewed Chris Forbes, the CEO of Knovel, September 15, 2006.  Excerpt:

Q:  Many of Knovel’s science and engineering data tools are available for free. Can you please comment on the degree of success of your hybrid model which accommodates both paying customers and individual free accounts?

A:  We offer a material amount of content for free, primarily in the academic market. All of the content we offer for free, which is generally high value chemical data, is owned by Knovel. We do this as a thank-you to academe in general as they have been tremendously supportive of Knovel and our strong growth. In fact, we provide free access to significant content to almost 1,000 institutions around the world and are pleased to provide access to any institution that would find chemical property information useful. Although, this approach is not entirely altruistic as the graduates of these institutions become our end users in the future and it is our goal to have those graduates demanding to know “where’s my Knovel” when they land at their first job.