Elsevier

• 1. Introduction

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  Elsevier is a Dutch academic publishing company that sits at the center of one of the most contested debates in modern science: who owns the right to read what researchers discover. With over 2,800 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and more than 600,000 articles published each year, Elsevier is the largest conduit through which scientific knowledge moves from researchers to the rest of the world. Its archives hold over 17 million documents and 40,000 e-books, drawing more than one billion downloads annually.

  Yet the company reported a profit before tax of £2.295 billion with an adjusted operating margin of 33.1% in 2023. Much of what Elsevier publishes was paid for by public money through government grants. That gap between public funding and private profit has sparked boycotts on multiple continents, mass editorial board resignations, and a global push to make scientific research free to read by anyone. How did a company named after a 16th-century Dutch bookseller come to occupy this position? And why has it become such a lightning rod for the people who produce the very research it sells?

• 2. From Elzevir to Elsevier

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  Lodewijk Elzevir, who lived in Leiden and founded his bookselling business in 1580, had been dead for centuries before Elsevier the modern company was founded in 1880. The company borrowed the Elzevir family name and their printer's mark, a tree entwined with a vine bearing the Latin words Non Solus, meaning "not alone". Elsevier describes that logo as representing the symbiotic relationship between publisher and scholar.

  The modern company's expansion into scientific publishing came after 1945, fueled by the profits of a newsweekly called Elsevier, which published its first issue on the 27th of October 1945 and was an immediate commercial success. That weekly was itself a revival of a monthly magazine founded in 1891 to promote the publishing house's name, which had been forced to cease publication in December 1940 under the German occupation of the Netherlands.

  Even during the occupation, Elsevier's leadership was building an international footprint. In May 1939, Klautz established the Elsevier Publishing Company Ltd. in London. When the Nazis arrived in May 1940, a second office, the Elsevier Publishing Company Inc., had just been opened in New York City. By 1947, the company was publishing its first English-language journal, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, pointing toward what Elsevier would eventually become.

• 3. Building the Digital Library

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  In 1979, Elsevier Science Publishers launched the Article Delivery Over Network Information System, known as ADONIS, with four business partners. The project aimed to deliver scientific articles to libraries electronically and ran for over a decade before the internet made the question urgent.

  In 1991, Elsevier partnered with nine American universities on The University Licensing Project, known as TULIP, to put copyrighted material online for the first time. That experiment formed the basis for ScienceDirect, which launched six years later in 1997 as the first online repository of electronic scientific books and articles. Librarians and researchers were initially hesitant, but adoption grew steadily as institutions switched to e-only subscriptions.

  In 2004, Elsevier launched Scopus, a multidisciplinary metadata database of scholarly publications and only the second of its kind after the Web of Science. Scopus covers journals, conference papers, and books from across publishers, measuring performance at both the author and publication level. Five years later, in 2009, Elsevier released SciVal Spotlight, a tool that enabled research administrators to measure their institution's relative standing in terms of productivity, grants, and publications.

  The acquisition of Mendeley in 2013 illustrated a different kind of digital strategy. Mendeley had been an open platform for sharing research papers. The New Yorker described Elsevier's motivation as two-fold: to acquire Mendeley's user data and to neutralize what it called an open-science icon that threatened its business model. Mendeley's previously open-sharing system was restructured to allow exchange of resources only within private groups.

• 4. The Price of Science

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  A 2004 resolution by Stanford University's senate singled out Elsevier's journals as "disproportionately expensive compared to their educational and research value", advising librarians to consider dropping them and faculty not to contribute editorial work to exploitively priced publishers. The University of California, Harvard University, and Duke University each issued similar guidelines.

  Some very large journals with more than 5,000 articles charge subscription prices as high as £9,634. Many British universities pay more than a million pounds to Elsevier annually. In Finland, research organizations paid a total of 27 million euros in subscription fees in 2015, with over one-third going to Elsevier alone. That figure only became public after a court appeal overturned a denied request, because Elsevier's contracts carry confidentiality clauses.

  In March 2018, the faculty of Florida State University in Tallahassee voted to cancel a $2 million subscription to a bundle of Elsevier journals. The University of North Carolina cited a license costing $2.6 million annually when it declined to renew in April 2020. MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts announced in June 2020 that it would no longer pay for access to new Elsevier articles.

  Elsevier's response to critics has been consistent. The company has argued that its prices fall below the industry average and that bundling is just one of several options available to buyers. It has attributed its profit margins to efficient operation. In 2019, Elsevier accounted for 34% of the revenues of its parent company RELX, representing £2.637 billion of RELX's £7.874 billion total.

• 5. Boycotts and Walkouts

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  On the 21st of January 2012, mathematician Timothy Gowers publicly announced that he would boycott Elsevier, pointing to high subscription prices, journal bundling, and Elsevier's support for SOPA, PIPA, and the Research Works Act. That last bill would have prohibited open-access mandates for U.S. federally-funded research. Within days of Gowers's announcement, a petition appeared on a site called The Cost of Knowledge. By February 2012, over 5,000 academics had signed it. By November 2018, that number had grown to over 17,000.

  On the 27th of February 2012, Elsevier withdrew support from the Research Works Act. Hours later, the bill's sponsors in Congress, representatives Darrell Issa and Carolyn Maloney, issued a joint statement saying they would not push it forward.

  Germany's response was broader. The DEAL consortium, comprising over 60 major research institutions, announced that all members would cancel their Elsevier contracts effective the 1st of January 2017. By August 2017, at least 185 German institutions had done so. The Max Planck Society in Munich, which counts 14,000 scientists across 84 research institutes publishing 12,000 articles each year, announced in December 2018 that it would not renew its agreement. As of 2023, almost no academic institution in Germany is subscribed to Elsevier.

  In May 2018, Sweden's Bibsam Consortium, negotiating on behalf of all Swedish universities, declined to renew its contract. Consortium chairman Astrid Söderbergh Widding stated that the current system for scholarly communication must change and that canceling deals is "our only option" when demands for a sustainable transition are not met. In Taiwan, more than 75% of universities, including the top 11 institutions, joined a collective boycott, and in December 2016 the CONCERT consortium representing more than 140 institutions announced it would not renew.

• 6. Editorial Boards in Revolt

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  In 1999, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Logic Programming resigned after 16 months of failed negotiations with Elsevier over library subscription prices. The board founded a new journal, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, published by Cambridge University Press at a much lower price. Elsevier kept the old journal running under a new board and a slightly different name.

  In 2015, the entire editorial staff of the linguistics journal Lingua resigned over Elsevier's refusal to adopt Fair Open Access terms. Editor-in-chief Johan Rooryck announced that the Lingua staff would establish a new journal called Glossa. Also in 2015, Stephen Leeder was removed as editor of the Medical Journal of Australia after its publisher outsourced production to Elsevier; all but one member of the editorial advisory committee then resigned together.

  In December 2024, the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution resigned, with the board citing actions by Elsevier that were "fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal". Their specific complaints included interference in the editorial board, inadequate support, and the disruptive use of generative artificial intelligence to alter submissions without informing editors or contributors. The NeuroImage editorial board resigned in 2023, calling Elsevier's $3,450 per-article processing charge "unethical and unsustainable".

• 7. Fake Journals and Hidden Conflicts

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  At a 2009 court case in Australia where Merck was being sued by a user of Vioxx, the plaintiff alleged that Merck had paid Elsevier to publish the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine. The journal appeared to be peer-reviewed but contained only articles favorable to Merck drugs. In May 2009, Elsevier Health Sciences CEO Hansen issued a statement conceding that these were "sponsored article compilation publications, on behalf of pharmaceutical clients, that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures". Hansen called it "an unacceptable practice".

  An Elsevier spokesperson confirmed that six such publications were produced by the company's Australia office under the Excerpta Medica imprint between 2000 and 2005. They included journals with titles covering bone and joint medicine, general practice, neurology, cardiology, clinical pharmacy, and cardiovascular medicine. Excerpta Medica itself was described as a strategic medical communications agency run by Elsevier. In October 2010, Excerpta Medica was acquired by Adelphi Worldwide.

  A separate controversy surrounded the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. Its editor-in-chief, Mohamed El Naschie, was accused of using his position to publish his own work without proper peer review. The journal had published 322 papers listing him as author since 1993, including five in the final December 2008 issue. Elsevier announced in January 2009 that El Naschie had retired. In July 2012, a judge dismissed El Naschie's libel suit against the journal Nature, ruling that Nature's reporting was substantially true and contained honest comment. The judge found reasonable and serious grounds for suspecting that El Naschie had used false names to defend his editorial practices, describing the behavior as "curious" and "bizarre".

• 8. Who Pays and Who Reads

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  Over 20,000 editors manage the peer review and selection of papers submitted to Elsevier publications, and they are generally unpaid volunteers who do this work alongside full-time jobs at academic institutions. In 2013, Elsevier along with Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor and Francis, and SAGE Publications together published more than half of all peer-reviewed academic papers in the world. At that time, Elsevier alone accounted for 16% of the global market in science, technology, and medical publishing.

  In 2018, Elsevier reported a mean 2017 gender pay gap of 29.1% for its UK workforce, with a median of 40.4%, the highest yet reported by a publisher in the United Kingdom. The company attributed this to the under-representation of women in senior ranks and the prevalence of men in technical roles. The UK workforce of 1,200 people represents 16% of Elsevier's global employee count of 8,100.

  Elsevier publishes in 13 languages, including English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Japanese, Hindi, and Chinese. Its flagship reference works include Gray's Anatomy, Nelson Pediatrics, Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary, and Netter's Atlas of Human Anatomy. In May 2026, Elsevier joined other major publishers in suing Meta Platforms, alleging that Meta used their books and journal articles without permission to train its Llama large language model, opening a new front in the ongoing dispute over who controls access to scientific knowledge.