Elsevier

For other uses, see Elsevier (disambiguation).

Elsevier
Company typeSubsidiary
IndustryPublishing
Founded1880; 144 years ago (1880)
Headquarters
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Key people
Kumsal Bayazit, Chief Executive Officer
Revenue£2.909 billion (2022)[1]
£1.078 billion (2022)[1]
£2.021 billion (2022)[2]
Number of employees
9500[3]
ParentRELX
Websitewww.elsevier.com

Elsevier (Dutch: [ˈɛlzəviːr]) 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, the Current Opinion series, the online citation database Scopus, 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 include digital tools for data management, instruction, research analytics, and assessment.[4][5] Elsevier is part of the RELX Group, known until 2015 as Reed Elsevier, a publicly traded company. According to RELX reports, in 2022 Elsevier published more than 600,000 articles annually in over 2,800 journals;[1] as of 2018 its archives contained over 17 million documents and 40,000 e-books, with over one billion annual downloads.[6]

Researchers have criticized Elsevier for its high profit margins and copyright practices.[7][8] The company had a reported profit before tax of £2,295 million with an adjusted operating margin of 33.1% in 2023.[9] Much of the research that Elsevier publishes is publicly funded; its high costs have led to accusations of rent-seeking,[10] boycotts, and the rise of alternate avenues for publication and access, such as preprint servers and shadow libraries.[11][12]

  1. ^ a b c "RELX Annual Report". RELX. Archived (PDF) from the original on 20 July 2023. Retrieved 20 July 2023.
  2. ^ "RELX Net Income 2006-2020". Macrotrends. Archived from the original on 20 July 2023. Retrieved 20 July 2023.
  3. ^ "Who we are". Elsevier. Archived from the original on 2 October 2024. Retrieved 14 November 2024.
  4. ^ Carpenter, Todd (2 February 2017). "Plum Goes Orange – Elsevier Acquires Plum Analytics". The Scholarly Kitchen. Society for Scholarly Publishing. Archived from the original on 5 August 2018. Retrieved 1 January 2021.
  5. ^ "Elsevier's SciVal". University of British Columbia. Archived from the original on 24 November 2020. Retrieved 1 January 2021.
  6. ^ "2021 RELX Group Annual Report". RELX Company Reports. RELX. March 2022. Archived from the original on 9 January 2023. Retrieved 16 March 2022.
  7. ^ Lin, Thomas (13 February 2012). "Mathematicians Organize Boycott of a Publisher". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 29 March 2021. Retrieved 26 February 2017.
  8. ^ Swoger, Bonnie (12 December 2013). "Is Elsevier really for-science? Or just for-profit?". Scientific American Blog Network. Archived from the original on 13 April 2022. Retrieved 13 April 2022.
  9. ^ "RELX 2023 Results". www.relx.com. Retrieved 31 July 2024.
  10. ^ Posada, Alejandro; Chen, George (20 September 2017). "Publishers increasingly in control of scholarly infrastructure and this is why we should care". The Knowledge G.A.P. Archived from the original on 11 May 2021. Retrieved 11 May 2021.
  11. ^ Resnick, Brian (3 June 2019). "The war to free science". Vox. Archived from the original on 11 April 2021. Retrieved 13 April 2022.
  12. ^ Buranyi, Stephen (27 June 2017). "Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 12 April 2022. Retrieved 13 April 2022.