History
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 theCompany statistics
, researchers submitted over 1.8 millionMarket model
Products and services
Products and services include electronic and print versions of journals, textbooks andPricing
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 theMergers and acquisitions
RELX Group has beenConferences
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 theBlocking text mining research
Elsevier seeks to regulateFossil 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 byFake journals
At a 2009 court case in Australia where Merck & Co. was being sued by a user of''Chaos, Solitons & Fractals''
There was speculation that the editor-in-chief of Elsevier journal ''Chaos, Solitons & Fractals'',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 ''Scientific racism
Manipulation of bibliometrics
According to the signatories of theControl of journals
Resignation of editorial boards
In November 1999, the entire editorial board (50 persons) of the ''"The Cost of Knowledge" boycott
In 2003, various university librarians began coordinating with each other to complain about Elsevier's "Subscription business model, 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 publicly announced he would boycott Elsevier, noting that others in the field have been doing so privately. The reasons for the boycott are high subscription prices for individual journals, bundling subscriptions to journals of different value and importance, and Elsevier's support for Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA, PROTECT IP Act, PIPA, 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, United States House of Representatives, US House Representatives Darrell Issa and Carolyn Maloney, 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". In September 2018, UBS 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 ConsortiumFinland
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), Couperin consortium agreed in 2019 to a 4-year contract with Elsevier, despite criticism from the scientific community. The French École Normale Supérieure has stopped having Elsevier publish the journal ''Annales Scientifiques de l'École Normale Supérieure'' (as of 2008). Effective on 1 January 2020, the French Academy of Sciences stopped publishing its 7 journals Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences with Elsevier and switched to Centre Mersenne.Germany
Almost no academic institution in Germany is subscribed to Elsevier. Germany's DEAL project (Projekt DEAL), 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 (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 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 (publishing), double dipping.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 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'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, theUkraine
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 (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 *Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) *The European Union's Open science, Open Science Monitor was criticised after Elsevier were confirmed as a subcontractor. *UK Research and InnovationSelling 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. 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 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.Sci-Hub and LibGen lawsuit
In 2015, Elsevier filed a lawsuit against the sites Sci-Hub and Library Genesis, 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.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 must take down Elsevier articles. A case was brought forward in 2017 by the Coalition for Responsible Sharing, a group of publishers that includes Elsevier and the American Chemical Society.Imprints
Elsevier uses its Imprint (trade name), imprints (that is, Brand, 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 *Baillière Tindall *BC Decker *Butterworth–Heinemann *CMP *Cell Press *Churchill Livingstone *Digital Press *Elsevier *Gulf Professional Publishing *GW Medical Publishing *Hanley & Belfus *Masson (publisher), Masson *Medicine Publishing *Morgan Kaufmann Publishers *Mosby (publisher), Mosby *Newnes *North-Holland Publishing Company *Pergamon Press *Pergamon Flexible Learning *Saunders (publisher), Saunders *Syngress *Urban & Fischer *William Andrew (publisher), William Andrew *Woodhead Publishing (including Chandos and Horwood)See also
* List of Elsevier periodicals * 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 * Holtzbrinck Publishing Group * Lagardère Publishing * McGraw Hill Education * News Corp * Pearson plc * Scholastic Corporation * Thomson Reuters * Wiley (publisher)References
Citations
Sources
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