30 Facts About Elsevier

Elsevier is a Netherlands-based academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content.

Elsevier is part of the RELX Group, a publicly traded company.

Much of the research that Elsevier publishes is publicly funded; its high costs have led to boycotts, with many institutes dropping their subscriptions altogether, and to the rise of alternate avenues for publication and access, such as preprint servers and shadow libraries.

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 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.

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In 1947, Elsevier began publishing its first English-language journal, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta.

In 1978 Elsevier merged with Dutch newspaper publisher NDU, and devised a strategy to broadcast textual news to people's television sets through Viewdata and Teletext technology.

In 2013, Elsevier acquired Mendeley, a UK company making software for managing and sharing research papers.

Elsevier attributed the result to the under-representation of women in its senior ranks and the prevalence of men in its technical workforce.

Elsevier has been criticized not only by advocates of a switch to the open-access publication model, but by universities whose library budgets make it difficult for them to afford current journal prices.

In July 2015, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier, which refused to negotiate on any open access 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.

Elsevier 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.

Elsevier seeks to regulate text and data mining with private licenses, claiming that reading requires extra permission if automated and that the publisher holds copyright on output of automated processes.

Elsevier is one of the most prolific publishers of books aimed at expanding the production of fossil fuels.

The personnel created a new journal, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, with Cambridge University Press at a much lower price, while Elsevier continued publication with a new editorial board and a slightly different name .

In March 2020, Elsevier effectively severed the tie between the Journal of Asian Economics and the academic society that founded it, the American Committee on Asian Economic Studies, by offering the ACAES-appointed editor, Calla Wiemer, a terminal contract for 2020.

Elsevier nonetheless stood by its offer, which the editor declined to accept.

On 21 January 2012, mathematician Timothy Gowers publicly announced he would boycott Elsevier, noting that others in the field have been doing so privately.

Elsevier claimed that its profit margins are "simply a consequence of the firm's efficient operation".

On 27 February 2012, Elsevier issued a statement on its website that declared that it has withdrawn support from the Research Works Act.

French Ecole Normale Superieure has stopped having Elsevier publish the journal Annales Scientifiques de l'Ecole Normale Superieure .

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.

In 2013, Elsevier changed its policies in response to sanctions announced by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control that year.

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.

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Elsevier have been known to be involved in lobbying against open access.

However, whether Elsevier was in violation of the license under which the article was made available on their website was not clear.

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.

In 2015, Elsevier filed a lawsuit against the sites Sci-Hub and LibGen, which make copyright-protected articles available for free.

Elsevier uses its imprints to market to different consumer segments.