On Wednesday, August 2nd, it was announced (here and elsewhere) that Elsevier had acquired bepress. Bepress, started in 1999 as Berkeley Electronic Press by three professors from UC-Berkeley, had grown to 73 employees. MSU, as well as approximately 500 other institutions of higher education, has been using Digital Commons from bepress as the platform for its institutional repository. Elsevier, one of the largest publishers of academic journals in the world, has been moving toward preprints, open access journal content, data analytics, improving scholarly workflow, and decision-support, as Roger Schonfeld notes in his article about this acquisition. It is unknown at this time how Elsevier’s ownership of bepress will affect product support, product development, and annual licensing fees. In an email sent yesterday afternoon, Jean-Gabriel Bankier, the Managing Director of bepress, apologized to customers for not notifying them of this sale of the company until the general world-wide press release was distributed.