Re Contract

Ingenta PLC
6 September 2001




Date:      Embargoed until 07.00hrs, Thursday 6th September 2001


Contacts:  ingenta                             Website: www.ingenta.com
           Mark Rowse, Chief Executive         Tel: [phone]
           David Callcott, Finance Director    Tel: [phone]

           Hudson Sandler
           Alistair Mackinnon-Musson           Tel: [phone]
           Philip Dennis                       Email: [e-mail]



                                 ingenta plc



                 ingenta wins major contract to take business

                     signed in August to over £3 million



ingenta plc is pleased to announce, further to the statement made this morning
by the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) and the European
Community (EC), that it has won a major contract to supply web infrastructure
to the first phase of EMBO's groundbreaking electronic information network
project, E-BioSci.



Under the three year first phase contract, ingenta will be a leading member of
a consortium to build and run the E-BioSci online service. ingenta will
provide the web delivery platform and key elements of access control and
linking technology, as well as access to relevant research literature. The
service is expected to increase the flow of traffic through the ingenta
service, and the demand for downloading of content from it.




E-BioSci is a EUR2.4 million European Community funded project, in its first
phase, aimed at providing scientists from academia and industry throughout
Europe with the tools for faster information access and distribution, which is
increasingly becoming an essential part of any life sciences research project.



Scientists will be able to use these tools, for example, to speed up the next
phase of research following the mapping of the human genome: the search for
the causes of genetically-induced disease and the drugs that will treat those
diseases. It will do this by linking gene sequence information to related
articles and other data. This complex linkage between different kinds of data
will enable researchers to match likely disease-causing substances to the part
of the gene sequence that produces them. From this they can begin to develop
drugs that counteract the effect of the disease-causing gene. Once understood,
the human genome is expected to have wide- ranging implications for the
treatment of numerous human conditions, including Cancer, Muscular Dystrophy
and Cystic Fibrosis.



Commenting, Mark Rowse, Chief Executive, ingenta plc, said:

'This is a further significant contract win for ingenta. It brings the total
value of business won by ingenta in August alone to over £3 million. This is a
considerable increase over the same period last year and demonstrates the
increasing recognition of the value of ingenta's services to the academic,
professional publishing and research industries.




We are delighted to be a lead player in this prestigious international
collaboration and to be involved in developing the world-leading E-BioSci
service for EMBO. As well as delivering revenues and increased traffic for
ingenta, it positions us as one of the major players in providing online
information services to the worldwide healthcare and pharmaceutical
industries, among the largest purchasers of online research information in our
sector.'



Commenting Prof. Frank Gannon, EMBO's Executive Director, said:

'We are extremely pleased to be working with ingenta on this project. ingenta
has the right combination of technology expertise and relationships with the
world's research publishers to help us to deliver this key project for the
molecular biology research community.'





Notes to editors



ingenta is the global market leader in the online distribution of published
scientific, professional and academic research. It provides an online search
service of published content from reliable research sources not freely
searchable elsewhere on the web and is one of the UK's top five web service
operators, serving over three million visitors a month.



For publishers of scientific, professional and academic periodicals, journals
and reference works, it provides a suite of services including data
conversion, secure online hosting, subscription authentication, marketing and
e-commerce services. As well as providing web users with a broad-based article
search and delivery service through www.ingenta.com, ingenta also develops
subject-focused e-communities, built in conjunction with societies and
publishers, and enterprise portal solutions for libraries.



ingenta's revenue streams derive both from fees paid by publishers, such as
Reed Elsevier Educational Publishing, Nature Publishing Group and Taylor &
Francis Group, and from a share of pay per view and subscription revenues from
users paying to download articles or subscribing to e-communities it operates
such as www.animalscience.com or www.nutritiongate.com.



e25, the definitive index of the UK's top 25 Internet businesses from leading
business magazine Management Today and business consultancy Bain & Company,
placed ingenta in the number 3 spot in its March 2001 edition, and US-based
InfoWorld has named ingenta as one of its top 100 e-businesses to watch.



Websites:

www.ingenta.com

www.e-biosci.org

www.embo.org