HighWire is a US company that provides digital content development and hosting services to ~140 influential societies, university presses and independent publishers that produce journals, books, and other scholarly publications. It was founded by Stanford University Libraries in 1995. HighWire also offers BenchPress, a customizable peer-review manuscript submission and tracking system, used by ~65 publishers. In 2014, majority ownership of HighWire was purchased by the private equity firmAccel-KKR. In 2017, it was announced that the entirety of the journals published by HighWire would be indexed in Meta.
Content
HighWire-hosted publishers collectively make over 2 million articles available freely accessible. In 1995, the Journal of Biological Chemistry published by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, was the first to launch online on the HighWire platform. Since then, a number of other journals use the technology service to develop and host their online content. Titles include, among many others:
The organization has grown significantly since its inception in 1995. In addition to journals, HighWire produces and hosts ebooks, conference proceedings, databases, and more. They use open source technologies, such as Drupal, as part of the front end of the newest version of the websites.
Reviews and awards
While HighWire is primarily a hosting facility, a 2007 study showed that its search engine outperformed PubMed in the identification of desired articles, and yielded a higher number of search results than when the same search was performed on PubMed. PubMed, however, was faster. HighWire was the recipient of the 2003 Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers Award for "Service to Not-for-Profit Publishing", and was named one of the "Ten to Watch" organizations in the Scientific, Technical & Medical information space in 2014 by Outsell. Founding Director John Sack was awarded the Council of Science Editors 2011 Award for Meritorious Achievement. In 2018, HighWire won the Best Business Intelligence Reporting & Analytics Solution award for their Vizors analytics product at the SIIA CODiE Awards. HighWire was named a 'Best Place to Work' by The Business Intelligence Group in May 2018.
