Elsevier, the global publisher of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services that is a part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC, has acquired the assets of Collexis Holdings’ Inc. Collexis is a developer of semantic technology and knowledge discovery software. Its products included Expert Profiler, Reviewer Finder, Knowledge Engine, and Professional Social Networking, which variously provide capabilities to help those in the community identify potential collaborators and uncover new information around drug discovery, competitive analysis and more.

In a press release announcing the acquisition, Elsevier said that its SciVal suite of research tools and integrated workflow solutions will benefit from the addition of features Collexis brings to the table around helping its customers with performance, planning and funding requirements. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Elsevier introduced SciVal last year as a web-based tool for evaluating, establishing and executing research strategies.

It’s composed of two modules: SciVal Spotlight for academic institutions to evaluate their research output and adjust its direction, by graphically pinpointing their strengths and identifying leading researchers and institutions in each area, and SciVal Funding for research administrators and researchers to analyze the funding environment and locate funding opportunities.

Reed Elsevier, of course, is a huge gun in the world of STM (scientific, technical and medical publishing), and that’s a world that’s changing quite rapidly. In a recent interview of Sanford Bernstein research firm analyst Claudio Aspesi done by Richard Poynder over at his blog, Poynder noted that the analyst had suggested that Reed Elsevier pursue a progressive break up of the company, which today includes LexisNexis, Reed Business Information, Reed Exhibitions and Elsevier. He noted this in light of “the current global financial crisis [which] means that research libraries will no longer be able to afford to keep paying scholarly publishers like Elsevier the sums they have historically paid them for their journals.” Aspesi’s answer indicates that it is the Elsevier operation that should persist if that comes to pass. He said:

“In early 2008, the then CEO Crispin Davis singled out for disposal RBI (the business to business magazines division). Had management completed that divestiture in a timely manner, the Exhibitions division would have probably been next.

Since the divestiture of RBI failed, management has started to sell it in smaller pieces, but I would still expect RBI to be eventually divested entirely; at that point Exhibitions would probably follow. LexisNexis (the legal research business), finally, has significant competitive issues in North America.

On top of all this, there are almost no synergies among all these operating units. A progressive divestiture of all these assets, with the proceeds returned to shareholders, would leave Reed Elsevier operating only Elsevier — at that point the market would find a valuation that reflects the prospects of that division.”

LexisNexis, by the way, has introduced semantic search technology into its intellectual property research products. And among the company’s existing partnerships are one with semantic technology vendor NetBase; the latter’s ScienceBase APIs are used in NetBase partner’s Reed Elsevier’s Illuminat8 web-based research tool for the scientific and R&D knowledge worker communities.

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