Elsevier () is a Dutch
academic publishing
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally publ ...
company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''
The Lancet
''The Lancet'' is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal and one of the oldest of its kind. It is also the world's highest-impact academic journal. It was founded in England in 1823.
The journal publishes original research articles, ...
'', ''
Cell
Cell most often refers to:
* Cell (biology), the functional basic unit of life
Cell may also refer to:
Locations
* Monastic cell, a small room, hut, or cave in which a religious recluse lives, alternatively the small precursor of a monastery ...
'', the
ScienceDirect
ScienceDirect is a website which provides access to a large bibliographic database of scientific and medical publications of the Dutch publisher Elsevier. It hosts over 18 million pieces of content from more than 4,000 academic journals and 30,0 ...
collection of electronic journals, ''
Trends'', the ''
Current Opinion'' series, the online citation database
Scopus
Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-l ...
, the SciVal tool for measuring research performance, the ClinicalKey search engine for clinicians, and the ClinicalPath evidence-based cancer care service. Elsevier's products and services also include digital tools for data management, instruction, research analytics and assessment.
Elsevier is part of the
RELX Group
RELX plc (pronounced "Rel-ex") is a British multinational information and analytics company headquartered in London, England. Its businesses provide scientific, technical and medical information and analytics; legal information and analytics; ...
(known until 2015 as Reed Elsevier), a publicly traded company. According to RELX reports, in 2021 Elsevier published more than 600,000 articles annually in over 2,700 journals; as of 2018 its archives contained over 17 million documents and 40,000 e-books, with over one billion annual downloads.
Researchers have criticized Elsevier for its high profit margins and
copyright practices.
The company earned £942 million in profit with an adjusted
operating margin In business, operating margin—also known as operating income margin, operating profit margin, EBIT margin and return on sales (ROS)—is the ratio of operating income ("operating profit" in the UK) to net sales, usually expressed in percent.
: ...
of 37% in 2018.
Much of the research that Elsevier publishes is publicly funded; its high costs have led to accusations of
rent-seeking
Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth without creating new wealth by manipulating the social or political environment.
Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic effi ...
, boycotts, and the rise of alternate avenues for publication and access, such as
preprint
In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset versio ...
servers and
shadow libraries
A shadow is a dark area where light from a light source is blocked by an opaque object. It occupies all of the three-dimensional volume behind an object with light in front of it. The cross section of a shadow is a two-dimensional silhouette, o ...
.
History
![Elsevier](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Elsevier.svg)
Elsevier was founded in 1880 and adopted the name and logo from the Dutch publishing house
Elzevir that was an inspiration and has no connection to the contemporary Elsevier. The Elzevir family operated as booksellers and publishers in the
Netherlands
)
, anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau")
, image_map =
, map_caption =
, subdivision_type = Sovereign state
, subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands
, established_title = Before independence
, established_date = Spanish Netherl ...
; the founder,
Lodewijk Elzevir
Lodewijk Elzevir (c. 1540, Leuven – 4 February 1617, Leiden), originally ''Lodewijk or Louis Elsevier or Elzevier'', was a printer, born in the city of Leuven (today in Belgium, then part of the Habsburg Netherlands or Spanish Netherlands). He wa ...
(1542–1617), lived in
Leiden
Leiden (; in English and archaic Dutch also Leyden) is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland, Netherlands. The municipality of Leiden has a population of 119,713, but the city forms one densely connected agglomeration wit ...
and established that business in 1580. As a company logo, Elsevier used the Elzevir family's
printer's mark
A printer's mark, device, emblem or insignia is a symbol that was used as a trademark by early printers starting in the 15th century.
The first printer's mark is found in the 1457 Mainz Psalter by Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer. One of the mos ...
, a tree entwined with a vine and the words ''Non Solus'', which is
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
for "not alone".
According to Elsevier, this logo represents "the symbiotic relationship between publisher and scholar".
The expansion of Elsevier in the scientific field after 1945 was funded with the profits of the newsweekly ''
Elsevier
Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', th ...
'', which published its first issue on 27 October 1945. The weekly was an instant success and very profitable. The weekly was a continuation, as is stated in its first issue, of the monthly ''Elsevier'', which was founded in 1891 to promote the name of the publishing house and had to stop publication in December 1940 because of the
German occupation of the Netherlands
Despite Dutch neutrality, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940 as part of Fall Gelb (Case Yellow). On 15 May 1940, one day after the bombing of Rotterdam, the Dutch forces surrendered. The Dutch government and the royal family re ...
.
In May 1939 Klautz established the Elsevier Publishing Company Ltd. in London to distribute these academic titles in the
British Commonwealth
The Commonwealth of Nations, simply referred to as the Commonwealth, is a political association of 56 member states, the vast majority of which are former territories of the British Empire. The chief institutions of the organisation are the Co ...
(except Canada). When the
Nazis occupied the Netherlands for the duration of five years from May 1940, he had just founded a second international office, the Elsevier Publishing Company Inc. in
New York
New York most commonly refers to:
* New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York
* New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States
New York may also refer to:
Film and television
* '' ...
.
In 1947, Elsevier began publishing its first English-language journal, ''
Biochimica et Biophysica Acta
''Biochimica et Biophysica Acta'' (''BBA'') is a peer-reviewed scientific journal in the field of biochemistry and biophysics that was established in 1947. The journal is published by Elsevier with a total of 100 annual issues in ten specialised ...
''.
In 1971 the firm acquired
Excerpta Medica Excerpta (Latin for "excerpts") may refer to:
*''Excerpta Barocciana'', extracts from Late Antique church historians found in Codex Baroccianus 142
*''Excerpta Constantiniana'', 53-volume Greek anthology of excerpts from historians
*''Excerpta Lati ...
, a small medical abstract publisher based in
Amsterdam
Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the Capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population ...
.
As the first and only company in the world that employed a database for the production of journals, it introduced computer technology to Elsevier. In 1978 Elsevier merged with Dutch newspaper publisher NDU, and devised a strategy to broadcast textual news to people's television sets through
Viewdata
Viewdata is a Videotex implementation. It is a type of information retrieval service in which a subscriber can access a remote database via a common carrier channel, request data and receive requested data on a video display over a separate ch ...
and
Teletext
A British Ceefax football index page from October 2009, showing the three-digit page numbers for a variety of football news stories
Teletext, or broadcast teletext, is a standard for displaying text and rudimentary graphics on suitably equipp ...
technology.
In 1979 Elsevier Science Publishers launched the Article Delivery Over Network Information System (ADONIS) project in conjunction with four business partners. The project aims to find a way to deliver scientific articles to libraries electronically, and would continue for over a decade. In 1991, in conjunction with nine American universities, Elsevier's The University Licensing Project (TULIP) was the first step in creating published, copyrighted material available over the Internet. It formed the basis for
ScienceDirect
ScienceDirect is a website which provides access to a large bibliographic database of scientific and medical publications of the Dutch publisher Elsevier. It hosts over 18 million pieces of content from more than 4,000 academic journals and 30,0 ...
, launched six years later. In 1997, after almost two decades of experiments, ScienceDirect is launched as the first online repository of electronic (scientific) books and articles. Though librarians and researchers were initially hesitant regarding the new technology, more and more of them switched to e-only subscriptions.
In 2004,
Scopus
Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-l ...
was launched. The abstract database covers journals and books from various publishers, and measures performance on both author and publication levels. In 2009 SciVal Spotlight was released. This tool enabled research administrators to measure their institution's relative standing in terms of productivity, grants, and publications .
In 2013, Elsevier acquired
Mendeley
Mendeley is a reference manager software developed by Elsevier. It is used to manage and share research papers and generate bibliographies for scholarly articles.
History
The company Mendeley, named after the biologist Gregor Mendel and chemist D ...
, a UK company making software for managing and sharing research papers. Mendeley, previously an open platform for sharing of research, was greatly criticized for the sale, which users saw as acceding to the "
paywall
A paywall is a method of restricting access to content, with a purchase or a paid subscription, especially news. Beginning in the mid-2010s, newspapers started implementing paywalls on their websites as a way to increase revenue after years of ...
" approach to research literature. Mendeley's previously open-sharing system now allows exchange of paywalled resources only within private groups.
''
The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...
'' described Elsevier's reasons for buying Mendeley as two-fold: to acquire its user data, and to "destroy or coöpt an
open-science icon that threatens its
business model
A business model describes how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value,''Business Model Generation'', Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, and 470 practitioners from 45 countries, self-published, 2010 in economic, social, ...
".
Company statistics
, researchers submitted over 1.8 million
research papers
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally publ ...
to Elsevier-based publications. Over 20,000 editors managed the peer review and selection of these papers, resulting in the publication of more than 470,000 articles in over 2,500 journals.
Editors are generally unpaid volunteers who perform their duties alongside a full-time job in academic institutions, although exceptions have been reported. In 2013, the five editorial groups Elsevier,
Springer
Springer or springers may refer to:
Publishers
* Springer Science+Business Media, aka Springer International Publishing, a worldwide publishing group founded in 1842 in Germany formerly known as Springer-Verlag.
** Springer Nature, a multinationa ...
,
Wiley-Blackwell
Wiley-Blackwell is an international scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons. It was formed by the merger of John Wiley & Sons Global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business with Blackwell Publish ...
,
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group is an international company originating in England that publishes books and academic journals. Its parts include Taylor & Francis, Routledge, F1000 (publisher), F1000 Research or Dovepress. It is a division of Informa ...
, and
SAGE Publications
SAGE Publishing, formerly SAGE Publications, is an American independent publishing company founded in 1965 in New York by Sara Miller McCune and now based in Newbury Park, California.
It publishes more than 1,000 journals, more than 800 books ...
published more than half of all academic papers in the peer-reviewed literature. At that time, Elsevier accounted for 16% of the world market in science, technology, and medical publishing. In 2019, Elsevier accounted for the review, editing and dissemination 18% of the world's scientific articles. About 45% of revenue by geography in 2019 derived from North America, 24% from Europe, and the remaining 31% from the rest of the world. Around 84% of revenue by format came from electronic usage and 16% came from print.
The firm employs 8,100 people.
The CEO is Kumsal Bayazit, who was appointed on 15 February 2019.
In 2018, it reported a mean 2017
gender pay gap
The gender pay gap or gender wage gap is the average difference between the remuneration for men and women who are working. Women are generally found to be paid less than men. There are two distinct numbers regarding the pay gap: non-adjusted ...
of 29.1% for its UK workforce, while the median was 40.4%, the highest yet reported by a publisher in UK. Elsevier attributed the result to the under-representation of women in its senior ranks and the prevalence of men in its technical workforce.
The UK workforce consists of 1,200 people in the UK, and represents 16% of Elsevier's global employee population.
Elsevier's parent company, RELX, has a global workforce that is 51% female to 49% male, with 43% female and 57% male managers, and 29% female and 71% male senior operational managers.
In 2018, Elsevier accounted for 34% of the revenues of RELX group (£2.538 billion of £7.492 billion). In
operating profits, it represented 40% (£942 million of £2,346 million). Adjusted operating profits (with constant currency) rose by 2% from 2017 to 2018.
Profits grew further from 2018 to 2019, to a total of £982 million. the first half of 2019, RELX reported the first slowdown in revenue growth for Elsevier in several years: 1% vs. an expectation of 2% and a typical growth of at least 4% in the previous 5 years. Overall for 2019, Elsevier reported revenue growth of 3.9% from 2018, with the underlying growth at constant currency at 2%. In 2019, Elsevier accounted for 34% of the revenues of RELX (£2.637billion of £7.874billion). In adjusted
operating profits, it represented 39% (£982m of £2.491bn). Adjusted operating profits (with constant currency) rose by 2% from 2018 to 2019.
In 2019, researchers submitted over two million
research papers
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally publ ...
to Elsevier-based publications. Over 22,000 editors managed the peer review and selection of these papers, resulting in the publication of about 500,000 articles in over 2,500 journals.
In 2020 Elsevier was the largest academic publisher, with approximately 16 % of the academic publishing market and more than 3000 journals."
Market model
Products and services
Products and services include electronic and print versions of journals, textbooks and
reference work
A reference work is a work, such as a paper, book or periodical (or their electronic equivalents), to which one can refer for information. The information is intended to be found quickly when needed. Such works are usually ''referred'' to f ...
s, and cover the
health
Health, according to the World Health Organization, is "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity".World Health Organization. (2006)''Constitution of the World Health Organiza ...
, life, physical, and
social science
Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of soc ...
s.
The target markets are academic and government research institutions, corporate research labs, booksellers, librarians, scientific researchers, authors, editors, physicians, nurses, allied health professionals, medical and nursing students and schools, medical researchers,
pharmaceutical companies
The pharmaceutical industry discovers, develops, produces, and markets drugs or pharmaceutical drugs for use as medications to be administered to patients (or self-administered), with the aim to cure them, vaccinate them, or alleviate symptoms. ...
, hospitals, and research establishments. It publishes in 13 languages including English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Japanese, Hindi, and Chinese.
Flagship products and services include VirtualE,
ScienceDirect
ScienceDirect is a website which provides access to a large bibliographic database of scientific and medical publications of the Dutch publisher Elsevier. It hosts over 18 million pieces of content from more than 4,000 academic journals and 30,0 ...
,
Scopus
Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-l ...
,
Scirus
Scirus was a comprehensive science-specific search engine, first launched in 2001. Like CiteSeerX and Google Scholar, it was focused on scientific information. Unlike CiteSeerX, Scirus was not only for computer sciences and IT and not all of the ...
,
EMBASE, Engineering Village,
Compendex
Ei Compendex is an engineering bibliographic database published by Elsevier.
The name "Compendex" stands for COMPuterized ENgineering inDEX.
It covers scientific literature pertaining to engineering materials.
It started in 1884 under the name ...
,
Cell
Cell most often refers to:
* Cell (biology), the functional basic unit of life
Cell may also refer to:
Locations
* Monastic cell, a small room, hut, or cave in which a religious recluse lives, alternatively the small precursor of a monastery ...
, Knovel, SciVal, Pure, and Analytical Services, The Consult series (FirstCONSULT, PathCONSULT, NursingCONSULT, MDConsult, StudentCONSULT), Virtual Clinical Excursions, and major reference works such as ''
Gray's Anatomy
''Gray's Anatomy'' is a reference book of human anatomy written by Henry Gray, illustrated by Henry Vandyke Carter, and first published in London in 1858. It has gone through multiple revised editions and the current edition, the 42nd (Octob ...
'', ''Nelson Pediatrics'', ''
Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary
''Dorland's'' is the brand name of a family of medical reference works (including dictionaries, spellers and word books, and spell-check software) in various media spanning printed books, CD-ROMs, and online content. The flagship products are ''D ...
'', ''
Netter's Atlas of Human Anatomy'', and online versions of many journals including ''
The Lancet
''The Lancet'' is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal and one of the oldest of its kind. It is also the world's highest-impact academic journal. It was founded in England in 1823.
The journal publishes original research articles, ...
''.
ScienceDirect is Elsevier's platform for online electronic access to its journals and over 40,000 e-books, reference works, book series, and handbooks. The articles are grouped in four main sections: ''Physical Sciences and Engineering'', ''Life Sciences'', ''Health Sciences'', and ''Social Sciences and Humanities''. For most articles on the website, abstracts are freely available; access to the full text of the article (in PDF, and also HTML for newer publications) often requires a subscription or pay-per-view purchase.
In 2019, Elsevier published 49,000
gratis open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or Gratis v ...
articles and 370 full open access journals. Moreover, 1,900 of its journals sold
hybrid open access
A hybrid open-access journal is a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. This status typically requires the payment of a publication fee (also called an article processing charge or APC) to the publisher in order to p ...
options.
Pricing
The subscription rates charged by the company for its journals have been criticized; some very large journals (with more than 5,000 articles) charge subscription prices as high as £9,634, far above average, and many British universities pay more than a million pounds to Elsevier annually. The company has been criticized not only by advocates of a switch to the
open-access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
publication model, but also by universities whose library budgets make it difficult for them to afford current journal prices.
For example, in 2004, a resolution by
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
's senate singled out Elsevier's journals as being "disproportionately expensive compared to their educational and research value", which librarians should consider dropping, and encouraged its faculty "not to contribute articles or editorial or review efforts to publishers and journals that engage in exploitive or exorbitant pricing". Similar guidelines and criticism of Elsevier's pricing policies have been passed by the
University of California
The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, ...
,
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
, and
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...
.
In July 2015, the
Association of Universities in the Netherlands The Universiteiten van Nederland (UNL) is, since November 2021, the new name of the Vereniging van Universiteiten (VSNU; English: Association of Universities in the Netherlands). The UNL is a trade group of ten government-funded universities, three ...
announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier, which refused to negotiate on any
open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
policy for Dutch universities.
In October 2018, a complaint against Elsevier was filed with the European Commission, alleging anticompetitive practices stemming from Elsevier's confidential subscription agreements and market dominance. The European Commission decided not to investigate.
The elevated pricing of field journals in economics, most of which are published by Elsevier, was one of the motivations that moved the
American Economic Association
The American Economic Association (AEA) is a learned society in the field of economics. It publishes several peer-reviewed journals acknowledged in business and academia. There are some 23,000 members.
History and Constitution
The AEA was esta ...
to launch the ''
American Economic Journal
The ''American Economic Journal'' is a group of four peer-reviewed academic journals published by the American Economic Association. The names of the individual journals consist of the prefix ''American Economic Journal'' with a descriptor of the f ...
'' in 2009.
Mergers and acquisitions
RELX Group has been
active
Active may refer to:
Music
* ''Active'' (album), a 1992 album by Casiopea
* Active Records, a record label
Ships
* ''Active'' (ship), several commercial ships by that name
* HMS ''Active'', the name of various ships of the British Royal ...
in
mergers and acquisitions
Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are business transactions in which the ownership of companies, other business organizations, or their operating units are transferred to or consolidated with another company or business organization. As an aspect ...
. Elsevier has incorporated other businesses that were either complementing or competing in the field of research and publishing and that reinforce its
market power
In economics, market power refers to the ability of a firm to influence the price at which it sells a product or service by manipulating either the supply or demand of the product or service to increase economic profit. In other words, market powe ...
, such as
Mendeley
Mendeley is a reference manager software developed by Elsevier. It is used to manage and share research papers and generate bibliographies for scholarly articles.
History
The company Mendeley, named after the biologist Gregor Mendel and chemist D ...
(after the closure of
2collab),
SSRN
The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a repository for preprints devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences, humanities, life sciences, and health sciences, among others. Elsevier bought SSRN from So ...
,
bepress
Bepress is a commercial, academic software firm owned by RELX Group. It began in 1999 as the Berkeley Electronic Press, co-founded by academics Robert Cooter and Aaron Edlin. It makes products and services to support scholarly communication, in ...
/
Digital Commons
Digital Commons is a commercial, hosted institutional repository platform owned by RELX Group. This hosted service, licensed by bepress, is used by over 500 academic institutions, healthcare centers, public libraries, and research centers to sho ...
,
PlumX Plum Analytics is a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based altmetrics company dedicated to measuring the influence of scientific research.
History
It was founded in 2011 by Andrea Michalek, who is its current president, and Mike Buschman. It was acqui ...
, Hivebench, Newsflo, Science-Metrix,
and Interfolio.
Conferences
Elsevier also conducts conferences, exhibitions, and workshops around the world, with over 50 conferences a year covering life sciences, physical sciences and engineering, social sciences, and health sciences.
Shill review offer
According to the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board ex ...
, in 2009, the firm
lsevieroffered a £17.25 Amazon voucher to academics who contributed to the textbook ''Clinical Psychology'' if they would go on
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...
and
Barnes & Noble
Barnes & Noble Booksellers is an American bookseller. It is a Fortune 1000 company and the bookseller with the largest number of retail outlets in the United States. As of July 7, 2020, the company operates 614 retail stores across all 50 U. ...
(a large US books retailer) and give it five stars. Elsevier responded by stating "Encouraging interested parties to post book reviews isn't outside the norm in scholarly publishing, nor is it wrong to offer to nominally compensate people for their time. But in all instances the request should be unbiased, with no incentives for a positive review, and that's where this particular e-mail went too far", and that it was a mistake by a marketing employee.
Blocking text mining research
Elsevier seeks to regulate
text and data mining
Text may refer to:
Written word
* Text (literary theory), any object that can be read, including:
**Religious text, a writing that a religious tradition considers to be sacred
**Text, a verse or passage from scripture used in expository preachin ...
with private licenses,
[ claiming that reading requires extra permission if automated and that the publisher holds copyright on output of automated processes. The conflict on research and copyright policy has often resulted in researchers being blocked from their work. In November 2015, Elsevier blocked a scientist from performing ]text mining
Text mining, also referred to as ''text data mining'', similar to text analytics, is the process of deriving high-quality information from text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extract ...
research at scale on Elsevier papers, even though his institution already pays for access to Elsevier journal content. The data was collected using the R package "statcheck".
Fossil fuel company consulting and advocacy
Elsevier is one of the most prolific publishers of books aimed at expanding the production of fossil fuels. Since at least 2010 the company has worked with the fossil fuel industry to optimise fossil fuel extraction. It commissions authors, journal advisory board members and editors who are employees of the largest oil firms. In addition it markets data services and research portals directly to the fossil fuel industry to help “increase the odds of exploration success”.
Academic practices
"Who's Afraid of Peer Review"
In 2013, one of Elsevier's journals was caught in the sting set up by John Bohannon
John Bohannon is an American science journalist and scientist who is Director of Science at Primer, an artificial intelligence company headquartered in San Francisco, California. He is known for his career prior to Primer as a science journalist a ...
, published in ''Science'', called "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" The journal ''Drug Invention Today'' accepted an obviously bogus paper made up by Bohannon that should have been rejected by any good peer-review system. Instead, ''Drug Invention Today'' was among many open-access journals that accepted the fake paper for publication. As of 2014, this journal had been transferred to a different publisher.
Fake journals
At a 2009 court case in Australia where Merck & Co. was being sued by a user of Vioxx
Rofecoxib is a COX-2 selective nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID). It was marketed by Merck & Co. to treat osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, acute pain conditions, migraine, and dysmenorrhea. Rofecoxib ...
, the plaintiff alleged that Merck had paid Elsevier to publish the ''Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine
The ''Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine'' (originally titled the ''Australasian Journal of Musculoskeletal Medicine'') was a periodical presented in the style of a scientific journal, published by Elsevier but established and funded by ...
'', which had the appearance of being a peer-reviewed academic journal
An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and d ...
but in fact contained only articles favourable to Merck drugs. Merck described the journal as a "complimentary publication," denied claims that articles within it were ghost written
A ghostwriter is hired to write literary or journalistic works, speeches, or other texts that are officially credited to another person as the author. Celebrities, executives, participants in timely news stories, and political leaders often h ...
by Merck, and stated that the articles were all reprinted from peer-reviewed medical journals. In May 2009, Elsevier Health Sciences CEO Hansen released a statement regarding Australia-based sponsored journals, conceding that they were "sponsored article compilation publications, on behalf of pharmaceutical clients, that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures." The statement acknowledged that it "was an unacceptable practice." '' The Scientist'' reported that, according to an Elsevier spokesperson, six sponsored publications "were put out by their Australia office and bore the Excerpta Medica Excerpta (Latin for "excerpts") may refer to:
*''Excerpta Barocciana'', extracts from Late Antique church historians found in Codex Baroccianus 142
*''Excerpta Constantiniana'', 53-volume Greek anthology of excerpts from historians
*''Excerpta Lati ...
imprint from 2000 to 2005," namely the ''Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine'' (''Australas. J. Bone Joint Med.''), the ''Australasian Journal of General Practice'' (''Australas. J. Gen. Pract.''), the ''Australasian Journal of Neurology'' (''Australas. J. Neurol.''), the ''Australasian Journal of Cardiology'' (''Australas. J. Cardiol.''), the ''Australasian Journal of Clinical Pharmacy'' (''Australas. J. Clin. Pharm.''), and the ''Australasian Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine'' (''Australas. J. Cardiovasc. Med.''). Excerpta Medica was a "strategic medical communications agency" run by Elsevier, according to the imprint's web page. In October 2010, Excerpta Medica was acquired by Adelphi Worldwide.
''Chaos, Solitons & Fractals''
There was speculation that the editor-in-chief of Elsevier journal ''Chaos, Solitons & Fractals'', Mohamed El Naschie Mohamed El Naschie ( ar, محمد النشائي, born 1943) is an Egyptian engineer and the former editor of a controversial journal, '' Chaos, Solitons & Fractals''. The controversy concerned El Naschie's publication, over many years, of over 300 ...
, misused his power to publish his own work without appropriate peer review. The journal had published 322 papers with El Naschie as author since 1993. The last issue of December 2008 featured five of his papers. The controversy was covered extensively in blogs. The publisher announced in January 2009 that El Naschie had retired as editor-in-chief. the co-Editors-in-Chief of the journal were Maurice Courbage and Paolo Grigolini. In June 2011, El Naschie sued the journal ''Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...
'' for libel, claiming that his reputation had been damaged by their November 2008 article about his retirement, which included statements that ''Nature'' had been unable to verify his claimed affiliations with certain international institutions. The suit came to trial in November 2011 and was dismissed in July 2012, with the judge ruling that the article was "substantially true", contained "honest comment", and was "the product of responsible journalism". The judgement noted that El Naschie, who represented himself in court, had failed to provide any documentary evidence that his papers had been peer-reviewed.["Nature libel verdict 'a victory for free speech'"](_blank)
''The Guardian'' 6 July 2012 Judge Victoria Sharp
Dame Victoria Madeleine Sharp, , PC (born 8 February 1956) is the President of the King's Bench Division of the High Court of Justice in England and Wales.
Early life
She is the daughter of Lord Sharp of Grimsdyke. Her twin brother is Rich ...
also found "reasonable and serious grounds" for suspecting that El Naschie used a range of false names to defend his editorial practice in communications with ''Nature'', and described this behavior as "curious" and "bizarre".
Plagiarism
Elsevier's 'Duties of Authors' states that authors should ensure they have written entirely original works, and that proper acknowledgement of other's work must always be given. Elsevier claims plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical behaviour. Some Elsevier journals automatically screen submissions for plagiarism, but not all.
Albanian politician, Taulant Muka claimed that Elsevier journal ''Procedia
''Procedia'' is an open access journal series published by Elsevier.
The purpose of ''Procedia'' is to publish, for a fee, "proposed conference proceedings" in a "dedicated online issue". Elsevier advertises this product as having a focus on del ...
'' had plagiarized in the abstract of one of its articles. It is unclear whether or not Muka had access to the entirety of the article.
Scientific racism
Angela Saini
Angela Saini (born in London, 1980) is a British science journalist, broadcaster and the author of books, of which the fourth, ''The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality'', was published in 2023. Saini has worked as a reporter and presenter fo ...
has criticized the two Elsevier journals ''Intelligence
Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can b ...
'' and ''Personality and Individual Differences
''Personality and Individual Differences'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal published 16 times per year by Elsevier. It was established in 1980 by Pergamon Press and is the official journal of the International Society for the Study of Individu ...
'' for having included on their editorial boards such well-known proponents of scientific racism
Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscience, pseudoscientific belief that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racism (racial discrimination), racial inferiority, or racial superiority.. "Few tragedies ...
as Richard Lynn and Gerhard Meisenberg
Gerhard Meisenberg (January 22, 1953) is a German biochemist. As of 2018, he was a professor of physiology and biochemistry at Ross University School of Medicine in Dominica.As of July 2018, Meisenberg was listed as faculty one Ross University's ...
; in response to her inquiries, Elsevier defended their presence as editors. The journal ''Intelligence'' has been criticized for having "occasionally included papers with pseudoscientific findings about intelligence differences between races." It is the official journal of the International Society for Intelligence Research, which organizes the controversial series of conferences London Conference on Intelligence, described by the ''New Statesman'' as a forum for scientific racism.
In response to a 2019 open letter, efforts by Retraction Watch
Retraction Watch is a blog that reports on retractions of scientific papers and on related topics. The blog was launched in August 2010 and is produced by science writers Ivan Oransky (Former Vice President, Editorial ''Medscape'') and Adam Mar ...
and a petition signed by over 1000 people, on 17 June 2020 Elsevier announced it was retracting an article that J. Philippe Rushton
John Philippe Rushton (December 3, 1943 – October 2, 2012) was a Canadian psychologist and author. He taught at the University of Western Ontario until the early 1990s, and became known to the general public during the 1980s and 1990s for resea ...
and Donald Templer
Donald I. Templer was an American psychologist best known for ideas on race and intelligence, and his association with the white nationalist group American Renaissance (magazine), American Renaissance. He was formerly a professor of psychology at A ...
published in 2012 in the Elsevier journal ''Personality and Individual Differences''. The article had claimed that there was scientific evidence that skin color was related to aggression and sexuality in humans.
One of their Journals, ''Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis'', was involved in the manipulation of the peer review report.
Manipulation of bibliometrics
According to the signatories of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) intends to halt the practice of correlating the journal impact factor to the merits of a specific scientist's contributions. Also according to this statement, this practice creates bias ...
(see also Goodhart's law
Goodhart's law is an adage often stated as, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who is credited with expressing the core idea of the adage in a 1975 article on mon ...
), commercial academic publishers benefit from manipulation of bibliometrics
Bibliometrics is the use of statistical methods to analyse books, articles and other publications, especially in regard with scientific contents. Bibliometric methods are frequently used in the field of library and information science. Biblio ...
and scientometrics
Scientometrics is the field of study which concerns itself with measuring and analysing scholarly literature. Scientometrics is a sub-field of informetrics. Major research issues include the measurement of the impact of research papers and academi ...
, such as the journal impact factor. The impact factor, which is often used as a proxy
Proxy may refer to:
* Proxy or agent (law), a substitute authorized to act for another entity or a document which authorizes the agent so to act
* Proxy (climate), a measured variable used to infer the value of a variable of interest in climate re ...
of prestige, can influence revenues, subscriptions, and academics' willingness to contribute unpaid work. However, there's evidence suggesting that reliability of published research works in several fields may ''decrease'' with increasing journal rank.
Nine Elsevier journals, which exhibited unusual levels of self-citation, had their journal impact factor of 2019 suspended from ''Journal Citation Reports
''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publicationby Clarivate Analytics (previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters). It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science-Core Collect ...
'' in 2020, a sanction which hit 34 journals in total.
Control of journals
Resignation of editorial boards
In November 1999, the entire editorial board (50 persons) of the ''Journal of Logic Programming
The ''Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal established in 1984. It was originally titled ''The Journal of Logic Programming''; in 2001 it was renamed ''The Journal of Logic and Algebraic Pr ...
'' (founded in 1984 by Alan Robinson) collectively resigned after 16 months of unsuccessful negotiations with Elsevier Press about the price of library subscriptions.Joan Birman
Joan Sylvia Lyttle Birman (born May 30, 1927, in New York CityLarry Riddle., ''Biographies of Women Mathematicians'', at Agnes Scott College) is an American mathematician, specializing in low-dimensional topology. She has made contributions to th ...
.
Scientific publishing: a mathematician’s viewpoint
. '' Notices of the AMS''. Vol. 47, No. 7, August 2000 The personnel created a new journal, ''Theory and Practice of Logic Programming'', with Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII of England, King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press
A university press is an academic publishing hou ...
at a much lower price,[ while Elsevier continued publication with a new editorial board and a slightly different name (the '']Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming
The ''Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal established in 1984. It was originally titled ''The Journal of Logic Programming''; in 2001 it was renamed ''The Journal of Logic and Algebraic ...
''). In 2002, dissatisfaction at Elsevier's pricing policies caused the European Economic Association
The European Economic Association (EEA) is a professional academic body which links European economists. It was founded in the mid-1980s. Its first annual congress was in 1986 in Vienna and its first president was Jacques Drèze. The current pres ...
to terminate an agreement with Elsevier designating Elsevier's ''European Economic Review
The ''European Economic Review'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal that covers research in economics. The journal was established in 1969 and the five main editors are: Florin Bilbiie, (University of Lausanne); David K. Levine, (European Universi ...
'' as the official journal of the association. The EEA launched a new journal, the '' Journal of the European Economic Association''. In 2003, the entire editorial board of the ''Journal of Algorithms'' resigned to start '' ACM Transactions on Algorithms'' with a different, lower-priced, not-for-profit publisher, at the suggestion of ''Journal of Algorithms'' founder Donald Knuth. The ''Journal of Algorithms'' continued under Elsevier with a new editorial board until October 2009, when it was discontinued.
The same happened in 2005 to the ''International Journal of Solids and Structures'', whose editors resigned to start the '' Journal of Mechanics of Materials and Structures''. However, a new editorial board was quickly established and the journal continues in apparently unaltered form with editors D.A. Hills (Oxford University
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
) and Stelios Kyriakides (University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...
). In August 2006, the entire editorial board of the distinguished mathematical journal ''Topology
In mathematics, topology (from the Greek language, Greek words , and ) is concerned with the properties of a mathematical object, geometric object that are preserved under Continuous function, continuous Deformation theory, deformations, such ...
'' handed in their resignations, again because of stalled negotiations with Elsevier to lower the subscription price. This board then launched the new '' Journal of Topology'' at a far lower price, under the auspices of the London Mathematical Society
The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh Mathematical S ...
. After this mass resignation, ''Topology'' remained in circulation under a new editorial board until 2009, when the last issue was published.
In May 2015, Stephen Leeder
Stephen Leeder AO FRACP FFPH FAFPHM FRACGP (born 13 December 1941 in Grafton, New South Wales) is an emeritus professor of public health and community medicine at the University of Sydney, where he was dean of medicine from 1997 to 2002. Leeder ...
was removed from his role as editor of the '' Medical Journal of Australia'' when its publisher decided to outsource the journal's production to Elsevier. As a consequence, all but one of the journal's editorial advisory committee members co-signed a letter of resignation. In October 2015, the entire editorial staff of the general linguistics journal '' Lingua'' resigned in protest of Elsevier's unwillingness to agree to their terms of Fair Open Access
A fair (archaic: faire or fayre) is a gathering of people for a variety of entertainment or commercial activities. Fairs are typically temporary with scheduled times lasting from an afternoon to several weeks.
Types
Variations of fairs incl ...
. Editor-in-chief Johan Rooryck also announced that the ''Lingua'' staff would establish a new journal, '' Glossa''. In January 2019, the entire editorial board of Elsevier's ''Journal of Informetrics
The ''Journal of Informetrics'' is a closed-access quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on scientometrics and informetrics. It was established in 2007 by Leo Egghe. The journal is published by Elsevier.
The editor-in-chief ...
'' resigned over the open-access policies of its publisher and founded open-access journal called ''Quantitative Science Studies''. In March 2020, Elsevier effectively severed the tie between the ''Journal of Asian Economics
The ''Journal of Asian Economics'' is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal focused on the economy of Asia. It was established in 1990 by the American Committee on Asian Economic Studies, and was published on the Committee's behalf by Elsevie ...
'' and the academic society that founded it, the American Committee on Asian Economic Studies (ACAES), by offering the ACAES-appointed editor, Calla Wiemer, a terminal contract for 2020. A diverse group of 43 academic stakeholders, including editorial board members, ACAES Advisory Council members, and authors, petitioned Elsevier in support of a three-year renewable contract for the editor. Elsevier nonetheless stood by its offer, which the editor declined to accept. A majority of the editorial board members refused invitations from Elsevier to continue with the post-ACAES journal and remain on the executive board of ACAES.
"The Cost of Knowledge" boycott
In 2003, various university librarians began coordinating with each other to complain about Elsevier's " big deal" journal bundling packages, in which the company offered a group of journal subscriptions to libraries at a certain rate, but in which librarians claimed no economical option was available to subscribe to only the popular journals at a rate comparable to the bundled rate. Librarians continued to discuss the implications of the pricing schemes, many feeling pressured into buying the Elsevier packages without other options.
On 21 January 2012, mathematician Timothy Gowers
Sir William Timothy Gowers, (; born 20 November 1963) is a British mathematician. He is Professeur titulaire of the Combinatorics chair at the Collège de France, and director of research at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity Col ...
publicly announced he would boycott Elsevier, noting that others in the field have been doing so privately. The reasons for the boycott
A boycott is an act of nonviolent, voluntary abstention from a product, person, organization, or country as an expression of protest. It is usually for moral, social, political, or environmental reasons. The purpose of a boycott is to inflict som ...
are high subscription prices for individual journals, bundling subscriptions to journals of different value and importance, and Elsevier's support for SOPA, PIPA
The pipa, pípá, or p'i-p'a () is a traditional Chinese musical instrument, belonging to the plucked category of instruments. Sometimes called the "Chinese lute", the instrument has a pear-shaped wooden body with a varying number of frets rang ...
, and the Research Works Act, which would have prohibited open-access mandates for U.S. federally-funded research and severely restricted the sharing of scientific data.
Following this, a petition advocating noncooperation with Elsevier (that is, not submitting papers to Elsevier journals, not refereeing articles in Elsevier journals, and not participating in journal editorial boards), appeared on the site "The Cost of Knowledge". By February 2012, this petition had been signed by over 5,000 academics,[ growing to over 17,000 by November 2018. The firm disputed the claims, claiming that their prices are below the industry average, and stating that bundling is only one of several different options available to buy access to Elsevier journals.] The company also claimed that its profit margins are "simply a consequence of the firm's efficient operation". The academics replied that their work was funded by public money, thus should be freely available.
On 27 February 2012, Elsevier issued a statement on its website that declared that it has withdrawn support from the Research Works Act. Although the Cost of Knowledge movement was not mentioned, the statement indicated the hope that the move would "help create a less heated and more productive climate" for ongoing discussions with research funders. Hours after Elsevier's statement, the sponsors of the bill, US House Representatives Darrell Issa and Carolyn Maloney
Carolyn Jane Maloney (née Bosher, February 19, 1946) is an American politician serving as the U.S. representative for since 2013, and for from 1993 to 2013. The district includes most of Manhattan's East Side, Astoria and Long Island City i ...
, issued a joint statement saying that they would not push the bill in Congress.
Plan S
The Plan S open-access initiative, which began in Europe and has since spread to some US research funding agencies, would require researchers receiving some grants to publish in open-access journals by 2020. A spokesman for Elsevier said "If you think that information should be free of charge, go to Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
". In September 2018, UBS
UBS Group AG is a multinational Investment banking, investment bank and financial services company founded and based in Switzerland. Co-headquartered in the cities of Zürich and Basel, it maintains a presence in all major financial centres ...
advised to sell Elsevier (RELX) stocks, noting that Plan S could affect 5-10% of scientific funding and may force Elsevier to reduce pricing.
Relationship with academic institutions
Colombia
For 14 years, Colciencias, now Minciencias, led negotiations with Elsevier, as a practical and effective response to the informative growth of presumptive problems, allowing a greater number of Higher Education Institutions to join this project, thanks to it saves the scale that is obtained. Colombia has converted in the fourth country with the largest number of documents indexed in Scopus in Latin America (except for Brazil), growing by 57% in the last five years, a rate visibly greater in neighboring countries.
The Colombian National Consortium
Consorcio Colombia
managed by Consortia S.A.S. agreed in 2016 to have better prices for the Consortium members. The current agreement is that (Colombia National Ministry of Science and Technology) Minciencias and (Colombian National ministry of Education) Mineducación reintegrate money to institutions on the total payment of products, with the condition that money must be reinvested in academic and research resources.
Finland
In 2015, Finnish research organizations paid a total of 27 million euros in subscription fees. Over one-third of the total costs went to Elsevier. The information was revealed after successful court appeal following a denied request on the subscription fees, due to confidentiality clauses in contracts with the publishers. Establishing of this fact lead to creation of tiedonhinta.fi petition demanding more reasonable pricing and open access to content signed by more than 2800 members of the research community. While deals with other publishers have been made, this was not the case for Elsevier, leading to the nodealnoreview.org boycott of the publisher signed more than 600 times.
In January 2018, it was confirmed that a deal had been reached between those concerned.
France
The French Couperin consortium agreed in 2019 to a 4-year contract with Elsevier, despite criticism from the scientific community.
The French École Normale Supérieure
École may refer to:
* an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée)
* École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France
* École, Savoi ...
has stopped having Elsevier publish the journal ''Annales Scientifiques de l'École Normale Supérieure
''Annales Scientifiques de l'École Normale Supérieure'' is a French scientific journal of mathematics published by the Société Mathématique de France. It was established in 1864 by the French chemist Louis Pasteur and published articles in ma ...
'' (as of 2008).
Effective on 1 January 2020, the French Academy of Sciences
The French Academy of Sciences (French: ''Académie des sciences'') is a learned society, founded in 1666 by Louis XIV of France, Louis XIV at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to encourage and protect the spirit of French Scientific me ...
stopped publishing its 7 journals Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences with Elsevier and switched to Centre Mersenne The Centre Mersenne is a publishing center to help open-access mathematical journals. The Centre Mersenne is located in Grenoble, France. It operates in partnership with UGA Éditions. It is supported by CNRS and Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), w ...
.
Germany
Almost no academic institution in Germany is subscribed to Elsevier.
Germany's DEAL project (Projekt DEAL
Project DEAL (Projekt DEAL) is a consortium-like structure spearheaded by German Rectors' Conference, the German Rectors’ Conference, on behalf of its fellow members in the and tasked with negotiating nationwide transformative open access agreem ...
), which includes over 60 major research institutions, has announced that all of its members are cancelling their contracts with Elsevier, effective 1 January 2017. The boycott is in response to Elsevier's refusal to adopt "transparent business models" to "make publications more openly accessible".[ Horst Hippler, spokesperson for the DEAL consortium states that "taxpayers have a right to read what they are paying for" and that "publishers must understand that the route to open-access publishing at an affordable price is irreversible".][ In July 2017, another 13 institutions announced that they would also be cancelling their subscriptions to Elsevier journals. In August 2017, at least 185 German institutions had cancelled their contracts with Elsevier. In 2018, whilst negotiations were ongoing, around 200 German universities that cancelled their subscriptions to Elsevier journals were granted complimentary open access to them until this ended in July of the year.]
On 19 December 2018, the Max Planck Society
The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (german: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e. V.; abbreviated MPG) is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. ...
(MPS) announced that the existing subscription agreement with Elsevier would not be renewed after the expiration date of 31 December 2018. MPS counts 14,000 scientists in 84 research institutes, publishing 12,000 articles each year.
Hungary
In March 2018, the Hungarian ''Electronic Information Service National Programme'' entered negotiations on its 2019 Elsevier subscriptions, asking for a read-and-publish deal. Negotiations were ended by the Hungarian consortium in December 2018, and the subscription was not renewed.
Iran
In 2013, Elsevier changed its policies in response to sanctions announced by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control
The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is a financial intelligence and enforcement agency of the U.S. Treasury Department. It administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions in support of U.S. national security and foreign policy ob ...
that year. This included a request that all Elsevier journals avoid publishing papers by Iranian nationals who are employed by the Iranian government. Elsevier executive Mark Seeley expressed regret on behalf of the company, but did not announce an intention to challenge this interpretation of the law.
Italy
CRUI (an association of Italian universities) sealed a 5-year-long deal for 2018–2022, despite protests from the scientific community, protests focused on aspects such as the lack of prevention of cost increases by means of the double dipping
A dual mandate is the practice in which elected officials serve in more than one elected or other public position simultaneously. This practice is sometimes known as double jobbing in Britain and ''cumul des mandats'' in France; not to be confused ...
.
Netherlands
In 2015, a consortium of all of Netherlands' 14 universities threatened to boycott Elsevier if it could not agree that articles by Dutch authors would be made open access and settled with the compromise of 30% of its Dutch papers becoming open access by 2018. Gerard Meijer, president of Radboud University in Nijmegen
Nijmegen (;; Spanish and it, Nimega. Nijmeegs: ''Nimwèège'' ) is the largest city in the Dutch province of Gelderland and tenth largest of the Netherlands as a whole, located on the Waal river close to the German border. It is about 6 ...
and lead negotiator on the Dutch side noted, "it's not the 100% that I hoped for".
Norway
In March 2019, the Norwegian government on behalf of 44 institutions — universities, university colleges, research institutes, and hospitals — decided to break negotiations on renewal of their subscription deal with Elsevier, because of disagreement regarding open-access policy and Elsevier's unwillingness to reduce the cost of reading access.
South Korea
In 2017, over 70 university libraries confirmed a "contract boycott" movement involving three publishers including Elsevier. As of January 2018, whilst negotiations remain underway, a decision will be made as to whether or not continue the participating libraries will continue the boycott. It was subsequently confirmed that an agreement had been reached.
Sweden
In May 2018, the Bibsam Consortium, which negotiates license agreements on behalf of all Swedish universities and research institutes, decided not to renew their contract with Elsevier, alleging that the publisher does not meet the demands of transition towards a more open-access model, and referring to the rapidly increasing costs for publishing. Swedish universities will still have access to articles published before 30 June 2018. Astrid Söderbergh Widding, chairman of the Bibsam Consortium, said, "the current system for scholarly communication must change and our only option is to cancel deals when they don't meet our demands for a sustainable transition to open access". Sweden has a goal of open access by 2026. In November 2019 the negotiations concluded, with Sweden paying for reading access to Elsevier journals and open access publishing for all its researchers' articles.
Taiwan
In Taiwan, more than 75% of universities, including the country's top 11 institutions, have joined a collective boycott against Elsevier. On 7 December 2016, the Taiwanese consortium, CONCERT, which represents more than 140 institutions, announced it would not renew its contract with Elsevier.[
]
United States
In March 2018, Florida State University
Florida State University (FSU) is a public research university in Tallahassee, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida. Founded in 1851, it is located on the oldest continuous site of higher education in the st ...
's faculty elected to cancel its $2 million subscription to a bundle of several journals. Starting in 2019, it will instead buy access to titles'' à la carte''.
In February 2019, the University of California
The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, ...
said it would terminate subscriptions "in push for open access to publicly funded research." After months of negotiations over open access to research by UC researchers and prices for subscriptions to Elsevier journals, a press release by the UC Office of the President issued Thursday, 28 February 2019 stated "Under Elsevier’s proposed terms, the publisher would have charged UC authors large publishing fees on top of the university’s multimillion dollar subscription, resulting in much greater cost to the university and much higher profits for Elsevier." On 10 July 2019, Elsevier began restricting access to all new paywalled articles and approximately 5% of paywalled articles published before 2019.
In April 2020, the University of North Carolina
The University of North Carolina is the multi-campus public university system for the state of North Carolina. Overseeing the state's 16 public universities and the NC School of Science and Mathematics, it is commonly referred to as the UNC Sy ...
elected not to renew its bundled Elsevier package, citing a failure "to provide an affordable path". Rather than extend the license, which was stated to cost $2.6 million annually, the university decided to continue subscribing to a smaller set of individual journals. The State University of New York
The State University of New York (SUNY, , ) is a system of public colleges and universities in the State of New York. It is one of the largest comprehensive system of universities, colleges, and community colleges in the United States. Led by c ...
Libraries Consortium also announced similar outcome, with the help of estimates from Unpaywall Journals
OurResearch, formerly known as ImpactStory, is a nonprofit organization which creates and distributes tools and services for libraries, institutions and researchers. The organization follows open practices with their data (to the extent allowed by ...
. Similarly, MIT announced in June 2020 that it would no longer pay for access to new Elsevier articles.
In 2022 Elsevier and the University of Michigan
, mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth"
, former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821)
, budget = $10.3 billion (2021)
, endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...
have established an agreement to support authors who wish to publish open access.
Ukraine
In June 2020 the Ukrainian government cancelled subscriptions for all universities in the country after failed negotiations. The Ministry of Education stated that Elsevier indexes journals in its register which call themselves Russian but are from occupied territories.
Dissemination of research
Lobbying efforts against open access
Elsevier have been known to be involved in lobbying against open access. These have included the likes of:
*The Federal Research Public Access Act The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) is a proposal to require open public access to research funded by eleven U.S. federal government agencies. It was originally proposed by Senators John Cornyn and Joe Lieberman in 2006 and then again i ...
(FRPPA)
*The Research Works Act
*PRISM. In the case of PRISM, the Association of American Publishers hired Eric Dezenhall, the so-called "Pit Bull Of Public Relations".
*Horizon 2020
The Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development, also called Framework Programmes or abbreviated FP1 to FP9, are funding programmes created by the European Union/European Commission to support and foster research in the Europea ...
*Office of Science and Technology Policy
An office is a space where an organization's employees perform administrative work in order to support and realize objects and goals of the organization. The word "office" may also denote a position within an organization with specific dut ...
(OSTP)
*The European Union
The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been des ...
's Open Science Monitor was criticised after Elsevier were confirmed as a subcontractor.
* UK Research and Innovation
Selling open-access articles
In 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017, Elsevier was found to be selling some articles that should have been open access, but had been put behind a paywall. A related case occurred in 2015, when Elsevier charged for downloading an open-access article from a journal published by John Wiley & Sons
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., commonly known as Wiley (), is an American multinational publishing company founded in 1807 that focuses on academic publishing and instructional materials. The company produces books, journals, and encyclopedias, in p ...
. However, whether Elsevier was in violation of the license under which the article was made available on their website was not clear.
Action against academics posting their own articles online
In 2013, Digimarc, a company representing Elsevier, told the University of Calgary
The University of Calgary (U of C or UCalgary) is a public research university located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The University of Calgary started in 1944 as the Calgary branch of the University of Alberta, founded in 1908, prior to being ins ...
to remove articles published by faculty authors on university web pages; although such self-archiving of academic articles may be legal under the fair dealing provisions in Canadian copyright law, the university complied. Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
and the University of California, Irvine
The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and pr ...
also received takedown notices for self-archived academic articles, a first for Harvard, according to Peter Suber.
Months after its acquisition of Academia.edu rival Mendeley
Mendeley is a reference manager software developed by Elsevier. It is used to manage and share research papers and generate bibliographies for scholarly articles.
History
The company Mendeley, named after the biologist Gregor Mendel and chemist D ...
, Elsevier sent thousands of takedown notices to Academia.edu, a practice that has since ceased following widespread complaint by academics, according to Academia.edu founder and chief executive Richard Price.
After Elsevier acquired the repository SSRN
The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a repository for preprints devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences, humanities, life sciences, and health sciences, among others. Elsevier bought SSRN from So ...
in May 2016, academics started complaining that some of their work has been removed without notice. The action was explained as a technical error.
Sci-Hub and LibGen lawsuit
In 2015, Elsevier filed a lawsuit against the sites Sci-Hub and LibGen, which make copyright-protected articles available for free. Elsevier also claimed illegal access to institutional accounts.
Initial rejection of the Initiative for Open Citations
Among the major academic publishers, Elsevier alone declined to join the Initiative for Open Citations. In the context of the resignation of the ''Journal of Informetrics editorial board, the firm stated: "Elsevier invests significantly in citation extraction technology. While these are made available to those who wish to license this data, Elsevier cannot make such a large corpus of data, to which it has added significant value, available for free."
Elsevier finally joined the initiative in January 2021 after the data was already available with an Open Data Commons license in Microsoft Academic
Microsoft Academic was a free internet-based academic search engines for academic publications and literature, developed by Microsoft Research, shut down in 2022. At the same time, OpenAlex launched and claimed to be a successor to Microsoft Aca ...
.
ResearchGate take down
A chamber of the Munich Regional Court has ruled that the research networking site ResearchGate has to take down articles uploaded without consent from their original publishers and ResearchGate
ResearchGate is a European commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. According to a 2014 study by ''Nature'' and a 2016 article in ''Times Higher Education'' ...
must take down Elsevier articles. A case was brought forward in 2017 by the Coalition for Responsible Sharing
A coalition is a group formed when two or more people or groups temporarily work together to achieve a common goal. The term is most frequently used to denote a formation of power in political or economical spaces.
Formation
According to ''A Gui ...
, a group of publishers that includes Elsevier and the American Chemical Society
The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 155,000 members at all d ...
.
Imprints
Elsevier uses its imprint
Imprint or imprinting may refer to:
Entertainment
* ''Imprint'' (TV series), Canadian television series
* "Imprint" (''Masters of Horror''), episode of TV show ''Masters of Horror''
* ''Imprint'' (film), a 2007 independent drama/thriller film
...
s (that is, brand names used in publishing) to market to different consumer segments. Many of the imprints have previously been the names of publishing companies that were purchased by Reed Elsevier.
*Academic Press
Academic Press (AP) is an academic book publisher founded in 1941. It was acquired by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1969. Reed Elsevier bought Harcourt in 2000, and Academic Press is now an imprint of Elsevier.
Academic Press publishes reference ...
*Baillière Tindall
*BC Decker
*Butterworth–Heinemann
Butterworth–Heinemann is a British publishing company specialised in professional information and learning materials for higher education and professional training, in printed and electronic forms. It was formed in 1990 by the merger of Hei ...
*CMP
* Cell Press
*Churchill Livingstone
Churchill Livingstone is an academic publisher.
It was formed in 1971 from the merger of Longman's medical list, E & S Livingstone (Edinburgh, Scotland) and J & A Churchill (London, England) and was owned by Pearson. Harcourt acquired Churchill ...
*Digital Press
*Elsevier
*Gulf Professional Publishing
Gulf Publishing Company is an international publishing and events business dedicated to the hydrocarbon energy sector. In mid-2018 it rebranded as Gulf Energy Information. Founded in 1916 by Ray Lofton Dudley, Gulf Energy Information produces an ...
*GW Medical Publishing
*Hanley & Belfus
* Masson
*Medicine Publishing
Medicine Publishing was an academic publishing company established in 1972. Since 2005, it is an imprint (trade name), imprint of Elsevier.
History
The company was founded with the establishment of its first journal, Medicine (Elsevier journal) ...
* Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
* Mosby
*Newnes
*North-Holland Publishing Company
*Pergamon Press
Pergamon Press was an Oxford-based publishing house, founded by Paul Rosbaud and Robert Maxwell, that published scientific and medical books and journals. Originally called Butterworth-Springer, it is now an imprint of Elsevier.
History
The cor ...
*Pergamon Flexible Learning
* Saunders
*Syngress
*Urban & Fischer
* William Andrew
*Woodhead Publishing
Woodhead Publishing Limited was established in 1989 as an independent international publishing company of science and technical books. The company publishes books in association with The Textile Institute, Cambridge International Science Publishin ...
(including Chandos and Horwood)
See also
* List of Elsevier periodicals
This is a list of scientific, technical and general interest periodicals published by Elsevier or one of its imprints or subsidiary companies. Both printed items and electronic publications are included in this list.
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
...
* 2collab, a free researcher collaboration tool launched by Elsevier in 2007 and discontinued in 2011
* Sci-Hub, a website providing free access to otherwise paywalled academic papers on a massive scale that is involved in a legal case with Elsevier
* Bertelsmann
Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA () is a German private multinational conglomerate corporation based in Gütersloh, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is one of the world's largest media conglomerates, and is also active in the service sector and ...
* Holtzbrinck Publishing Group
* Lagardère Publishing
Lagardère Publishing is the book publishing arm of Lagardère Group.
Publishing companies and imprints
France
*Calmann-Lévy
*Deux Coqs d'Or
*Disney Hachette Edition
*EDICEF
*Editions 1
*Editions du Chêne
**E.P.A
*Éditions Dunod
*Editions ...
* McGraw Hill Education
* News Corp
News Corporation, stylized as News Corp, is an American mass media and publishing company headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The second incarnation of the News Corporation (1980–2013), original News Corporation, it was formed ...
* Pearson plc
Pearson plc is a British multinational corporation, multinational publishing and education company headquartered in London, England.
It was founded as a construction business in the 1840s but switched to publishing in the 1920s.J. A. Spende ...
* Scholastic Corporation
Scholastic Corporation () is an American multinational publishing, education, and media company that publishes and distributes books, comics, and educational materials for schools, parents, and children. Products are distributed via retail and on ...
* Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters Corporation ( ) is a Canadian multinational media conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where it is headquartered at the Bay Adelaide Centre.
Thomson Reuters was created by the Thomson Corpora ...
* Wiley (publisher)
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., commonly known as Wiley (), is an American multinational publishing company founded in 1807 that focuses on academic publishing and instructional materials. The company produces books, journals, and encyclopedias, in p ...
References
Citations
Sources
*
External links
*
Campaign success: Reed Elsevier sells international arms fairs
*
{{authority control
Elsevier
Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', th ...
Academic publishing companies
Bibliographic database providers
Companies based in Amsterdam
Multinational companies headquartered in the Netherlands
Publishing companies established in 1880
Publishing companies of the Netherlands
Dutch companies established in 1880