Atypon

Ensuring Leading-Edge Capabilities of IDEAL Platform

San Diego, October 13, 2000 – Academic Press (AP), a Harcourt Science and Technology Company, and Atypon Systems, Inc. have signed a three-year contract—ensuring the leading-edge capabilities of the electronic platform powering IDEAL, AP's pioneering resource library for science, technology and medicine (STM) researchers. This contract will continue a synergistic partnership initiated in 1998, a partnership which has contributed significantly to AP's leadership of the electronic-publishing revolution.

This contract guarantees that Atypon's open-technology platform Literatum will continue to comprise the structural core of IDEAL and that AP will have access to emerging technologies to power the next generation of online-publishing features currently under development. Some of these technologies are still on the drawing boards at Atypon's software development centers.

Stated AP President Dr. Pieter Bolman, "As design and development partners working together since the genesis and launch of IDEAL, AP and Atypon have proven a winning team. Together we have constructed IDEAL so that it has successfully maintained its place as a leader among electronic publishers, and together we have made IDEAL into a pre-eminent cyberspace library for researchers changing the future of our world. We here at AP look forward with anticipation to the future of IDEAL and our future with Atypon."

Dr. Georgios Papadopoulos, founder and president of Atypon, said: "We are delighted at AP's decision to utilize Atypon's publishing and personalization technologies to further AP's leadership in STM electronic publishing. We at Atypon have built for IDEAL the perfect platform for the delivery of intelligent interfaces and personalized services. In creating for IDEAL's end-users an easy-to-use, agent-driven system, we have technologically outdistanced our competition. This new contract validates our superiority in providing solutions for the STM marketplace."

Atypon Systems, Inc. is based in Santa Clara, California and has a European office in Athens, Greece. As a leading business services provider for the STM marketplace, Atypon builds software and provides a host of services for biotechnology, healthcare, pharmaceutical, and e-learning and publishing industries. Atypon services in excess of 300 of the world's biotech and medical journals. For more information on this company, visit http://www.atypon.com.

IDEAL, the International Digital Electronic Access Library, is licensed in more than 20 countries by close to 1600 academic institutions and industrial and pharmaceutical companies and is accessible to over 10 million authorized users worldwide. IDEAL offers nearly 250 journals published by Academic Press, W.B. Saunders, Churchill Livingstone, Baillière Tindall and Mosby. By the end of 2001, IDEAL will offer 84 additional Harcourt Health Sciences journals.

IDEAL is the online library of the Harcourt Worldwide STM Group. Academic Press is a Harcourt Science and Technology Company and part of Harcourt's Worldwide Scientific, Technical and Medical Group. Academic Press is an international multiple-media publisher of high-quality journals, book serials, major reference works, databases, textbooks and monographs.

Through its wholly owned subsidiary, Harcourt, Inc., Harcourt General (NYSE: H) is a leading global multiple-media publisher, providing educational, training and assessment products and services to classroom, corporate, professional, research, medical and consumer markets.

For more information about IDEAL, visit http://www.idealibrary.com.

Contact:
Daria DeCooman
Academic Press
(619) 699-6283
ddecooman@acad.com