SAGE Publications acquisition of Pion
(May 2015)
Bertoli Mitchell is pleased to announce that it acted for the shareholders of Pion Limited in the sale of Pion, an independent publisher of high quality academic journals founded by Adam Gelbtuch and John Ashby in 1959, to SAGE Publications. Bertoli Mitchell provided strategic and commercial advice to Pion’s owners throughout the process.
Pion's portfolio includes the acclaimed 'Environment and Planning' series of journals, alongside Perception and its open access sister publication i-Perception. The acquisition results in the following journals moving to SAGE:
Environment and Planning A (EPA) – publishes innovative research at the interface of human geography, environment and regional research.
Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design (EPB) – introduced to cover the area of method application and spatial problems in built environments, with specialization in new approaches to generating and evaluating plans and policies.
Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy (EPC) – a research driven multidisciplinary journal which seeks to advance debates on a wide range of pressing contemporary policy issues arising from attempts made to govern the economy, society, and the environment.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (EPD) – provides a forum for the discussion of the mutually constitutive relation between the social and the spatial. The journal editors are equally committed to the spatial aspects of political action and the abstractions of social theory.
Perception – a scholarly journal reporting experimental results and theoretical ideas ranging over the fields of human, animal and machine perception.
i-Perception – OA sister journal to Perception. The journal is focused on the fields of senses and the perceptual process of humans, animals and machines.
Pion also has a small books list which includes the classic title Place and Placelessness by Edward Relph.
Speaking of the acquisition, Stephen Barr, President, SAGE International, remarked:
"Pion's publishing portfolio represents exactly what SAGE has always aspired to publish: major journals at the cutting edge of the development of key fields. Since our founding in 1965, SAGE has developed a leading high quality portfolio of journals across the social science disciplines and the Pion journals are a natural addition to SAGE’s well established journal portfolio. We are delighted to be the new publisher of the Pion Journals program and we look forward to working with the esteemed editorial boards across this program."
Commenting on Bertoli Mitchell’s role, Pion's Chairman David Cohen said:
"Bertoli Mitchell's track record in and knowledge of the UK scholarly and professional publishing industry were invaluable to us. Throughout the transaction, their commitment to a successful outcome was total. At every stage of the process, the quality of their advice – imbued with their specialist knowledge of the sector – was instrumental in ensuring such an outcome. I am truly delighted that we chose to be represented by them."