Elsevier facts for kids
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| Subsidiary | |
| Industry | Publishing |
| Founded | 1880 |
| Headquarters |
Amsterdam, Netherlands
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Key people
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Kumsal Bayazit, Chief Executive Officer |
| Revenue | £2.909 billion (2022) |
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Operating income
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£1.078 billion (2022) |
| £2.021 billion (2022) | |
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Number of employees
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9500 |
| Parent | RELX |
Elsevier is a large publishing company from the Netherlands. They focus on publishing scientific, technical, and medical information. This includes important journals like The Lancet and Cell.
Elsevier also offers digital tools for managing data, helping with research, and checking how well research is doing. Their online library, ScienceDirect, has many electronic journals. They also have Scopus, a database for finding research papers. Elsevier is part of a bigger company called RELX Group.
In 2022, Elsevier published over 600,000 articles in more than 2,800 journals. By 2018, their collection had over 17 million documents and 40,000 e-books. People downloaded these over a billion times each year.
However, some researchers have criticized Elsevier. They say the company charges very high prices for its journals. They also have concerns about how Elsevier handles copyright. Many research papers they publish are paid for by public money. The high costs have led to some boycotts and the rise of other ways to share research, like preprint servers.
History of Elsevier
Elsevier was started in 1880. It took its name and logo from an older Dutch publishing family called Elzevir. This family was an inspiration, but the modern Elsevier company is not directly connected to them. The Elzevir family were booksellers and publishers in the Netherlands. The first founder, Lodewijk Elzevir, started his business in 1580.
Elsevier uses the Elzevir family's old logo. It shows a tree with a vine and the words Non Solus, which means "not alone" in Latin. Elsevier says this logo shows how publishers and scholars work together.
After 1945, Elsevier grew a lot in the science field. This growth was funded by the success of their newsweekly magazine, Elsevier. This magazine started in 1945 and was very profitable.
In 1939, Elsevier started an office in London to sell academic books in the British Commonwealth. When the Nazis took over the Netherlands in 1940, they had just opened another international office in New York.
In 1947, Elsevier began publishing its first journal in English, called Biochimica et Biophysica Acta.
In 1970, Elsevier bought another publishing company called North-Holland. In 1971, they bought Excerpta Medica, a small medical publisher. This company used computer technology to create journals, which was new for Elsevier. In 1978, Elsevier joined with a Dutch newspaper publisher. They planned to send news to people's TVs using new technology.
In 1979, Elsevier started a project called ADONIS. It aimed to deliver scientific articles to libraries electronically. This project lasted over ten years. In 1991, Elsevier worked with nine American universities on TULIP. This was an early step in making copyrighted material available online. It led to the creation of ScienceDirect.
In 1997, after many experiments, ScienceDirect was launched. It was one of the first online places for electronic scientific books and articles. At first, librarians and researchers were unsure about this new technology. But over time, more and more of them started using online subscriptions.
In 2004, Elsevier launched Scopus. This is a large database of scholarly publications from many different fields. It helps measure how well authors and publications are doing. In 2009, they released SciVal Spotlight. This tool helps research managers see how their institution compares to others in terms of research output.
In 2013, Elsevier bought Mendeley. This UK company made software for managing and sharing research papers. Many Mendeley users were upset by this sale. They felt it went against the idea of open sharing of research. The New Yorker magazine suggested Elsevier bought Mendeley to get its user data and to control an open-science tool that could threaten its business.
Elsevier's Business and Numbers
In 2018, researchers sent over 1.8 million research papers to Elsevier. More than 20,000 editors reviewed and chose these papers. This resulted in over 470,000 articles being published in more than 2,500 journals. Most editors are volunteers who are not paid by Elsevier.
In 2013, Elsevier and four other big publishers published more than half of all academic papers. At that time, Elsevier had 16% of the world market in science, technology, and medical publishing. By 2019, Elsevier was involved in reviewing and sharing 18% of the world's scientific articles.
In 2019, about 45% of Elsevier's money came from North America. 24% came from Europe, and 31% from other parts of the world. About 84% of their money came from online use, and 16% from printed materials.
The company employs 8,100 people. Kumsal Bayazit became the CEO in 2019. In 2018, Elsevier reported a difference in pay between men and women in its UK workforce. They said this was because fewer women were in senior roles and more men were in technical jobs.
In 2018, Elsevier made up 34% of the money earned by its parent company, RELX Group. It also made 40% of RELX's operating profits. Profits continued to grow from 2018 to 2019. In 2020, Elsevier was the largest academic publisher. It had about 16% of the market and more than 3,000 journals.
What Elsevier Offers
Products and Services
Elsevier offers online and printed versions of journals, textbooks, and reference works. These cover health, life, physical, and social sciences.
Their main customers are universities, government research groups, and hospitals. They also work with doctors, nurses, and students. Elsevier publishes in 13 languages, including English, German, and Japanese.
Some of their main products include ScienceDirect, Scopus, and important reference books like Gray's Anatomy.
ScienceDirect is Elsevier's online platform. It gives access to their journals and over 40,000 e-books. The articles are divided into four main areas: Physical Sciences and Engineering, Life Sciences, Health Sciences, and Social Sciences and Humanities. You can usually read summaries of articles for free. To read the full article, you often need a subscription or to pay for it.
In 2019, Elsevier published 49,000 free open access articles. They also had 370 journals that were fully open access. Many of their other journals offered options for authors to make their articles open access for a fee.
Journal Pricing
Elsevier has been criticized for the high prices of its journal subscriptions. Some very large journals can cost thousands of pounds. Many British universities pay over a million pounds to Elsevier each year.
Universities and researchers have complained about these high costs. For example, Stanford University said in 2004 that Elsevier's journals were "too expensive". They encouraged their professors not to write for or edit journals from publishers with unfair prices. Similar concerns have been raised by the University of California, Harvard University, and Duke University.
In 2015, universities in the Netherlands threatened to boycott Elsevier. This was because Elsevier would not agree to an open access policy. After a year of talks, Elsevier agreed to make 30% of research by Dutch researchers open access by 2018.
In 2018, a complaint was filed against Elsevier in Europe. It claimed that Elsevier's secret subscription deals and market power were unfair. However, the European Commission decided not to investigate.
The high prices of economics journals, many published by Elsevier, led the American Economic Association to start its own journal, the American Economic Journal, in 2009.
Company Growth and Purchases
Elsevier's parent company, RELX Group, has often bought other businesses. Elsevier has bought companies that help or compete with its research and publishing work. This helps them become stronger in the market. Some of these purchases include Mendeley, SSRN, and bepress.
Conferences and Events
Elsevier also organizes conferences, exhibitions, and workshops around the world. They hold over 50 events each year. These events cover life sciences, physical sciences, engineering, social sciences, and health sciences.
Research Access Issues
Elsevier tries to control how researchers use text and data mining on its content. They say that using computers to read their content needs special permission. This has sometimes stopped researchers from doing their work. In 2015, Elsevier stopped a scientist from using text mining on their papers. This happened even though his university already paid for access to Elsevier journals.
Elsevier and Universities
Finland
In 2015, research groups in Finland paid 27 million euros for journal subscriptions. More than a third of this money went to Elsevier. This information became public after a court case. People then started a petition asking for fairer prices and open access. While deals were made with other publishers, Elsevier did not agree. This led to a boycott by over 600 researchers. In January 2018, a deal was finally reached.
France
In 2019, a group of French universities agreed to a four-year contract with Elsevier. This happened despite criticism from the scientific community. The French Academy of Sciences stopped publishing its seven journals with Elsevier in 2020. They switched to another publisher.
Germany
Since 2018, almost no universities in Germany subscribe to Elsevier journals. Germany's DEAL project, which includes over 60 research institutions, canceled their contracts with Elsevier in 2017. They wanted Elsevier to make publications more openly available and at fair prices. Horst Hippler, a spokesperson for DEAL, said that "taxpayers have a right to read what they are paying for." By August 2017, at least 185 German institutions had canceled their contracts.
In December 2018, the Max Planck Society also announced they would not renew their agreement with Elsevier. This society has 14,000 scientists who publish 12,000 articles each year. In 2023, Elsevier and DEAL reached a new agreement.
Hungary
In March 2018, a Hungarian program started talks with Elsevier about their 2019 subscriptions. They wanted a deal that included both reading access and open access publishing. The Hungarian group ended the talks in December 2018, and the subscription was not renewed.
Iran
In 2013, Elsevier changed its rules because of US government sanctions. They asked all Elsevier journals to avoid publishing papers by Iranian citizens who worked for the Iranian government. Elsevier said they regretted this, but did not challenge the law.
Italy
An association of Italian universities made a five-year deal with Elsevier for 2018–2022. This happened despite protests from scientists. They were concerned about rising costs.
Netherlands
In 2015, all 14 universities in the Netherlands threatened to boycott Elsevier. They wanted articles by Dutch authors to be made open access. They settled for a compromise: 30% of Dutch papers would become open access by 2018.
Norway
In March 2019, the Norwegian government, representing 44 institutions, stopped talks with Elsevier. They disagreed on open-access policy and Elsevier's refusal to lower reading costs.
South Korea
In 2017, over 70 university libraries in South Korea joined a "contract boycott" against three publishers, including Elsevier. By January 2018, an agreement was reached.
Sweden
In May 2018, a group representing all Swedish universities decided not to renew their contract with Elsevier. They said Elsevier was not meeting their demands for a move towards more open access. They also mentioned the quickly rising costs. Swedish universities can still access articles published before June 30, 2018. In November 2019, negotiations finished. Sweden now pays for reading access to Elsevier journals and open access publishing for its researchers.
Taiwan
In Taiwan, more than 75% of universities, including the top 11, joined a boycott against Elsevier. In December 2016, a Taiwanese group representing over 140 institutions announced they would not renew their contract.
United States
In March 2018, Florida State University decided to cancel its $2 million subscription to a bundle of journals. Starting in 2019, they would instead buy access to individual titles.
In February 2019, the University of California said it would end subscriptions. They wanted open access to publicly funded research. After months of talks, the university said Elsevier's proposed terms would cost them much more. In July 2019, Elsevier began limiting access to new articles.
In April 2020, the University of North Carolina also decided not to renew its Elsevier package. They said it did not offer an "affordable path" to open access. The university chose to subscribe to fewer individual journals instead. 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 made an agreement to help authors publish open access.
Ukraine
In June 2020, the Ukrainian government canceled subscriptions for all universities in the country. This happened after talks failed. The Ministry of Education claimed that Elsevier listed journals from "occupied territories" as Russian.
Awards and Partnerships
Elsevier works with many organizations and has its name on several awards.
Since 1987, Elsevier has partnered with the journal Spectrochimica Acta Part B to give an award for the best paper of the year.
The International Bone and Mineral Society has partnered with Elsevier for an award. It recognizes outstanding research and teaching in bone and mineral health.
From 2007, a Brazilian organization called CAPES partnered with Elsevier for an award. From 2013, this award was only for women to encourage more women in science.
Since 2011, the OWSD-Elsevier Foundation Awards have been given each year. These awards recognize early-career women scientists in developing countries.
In 2016, the Elsevier Foundation gave an award for Green and Sustainable Chemistry. Since 2021, this annual award is called the Elsevier Foundation Chemistry for Climate Action Challenge. It gives prizes to entrepreneurs who have projects that help fight climate change.
Elsevier's Publishing Names
Elsevier uses different brand names (called imprints) to sell to different groups of customers. Many of these imprints were once the names of other publishing companies that RELX Group bought.
- 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
- Medicine Publishing
- Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
- Mosby
- Newnes
- North-Holland Publishing Company
- Pergamon Press
- Pergamon Flexible Learning
- Saunders
- Syngress
- Urban & Fischer
- William Andrew
- Woodhead Publishing
See also
In Spanish: Elsevier para niños
- List of Elsevier periodicals
- Sci-Hub, a website that provides free access to academic papers, which is involved in a legal case with Elsevier.
