Elsevier
Elsevier is a prominent global publishing company based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and is recognized as one of the largest and most diverse entities in the scientific and academic publishing sector. Founded in 1880, the company specializes in publishing technical, medical, and scientific content, with a portfolio that includes prestigious journals such as The Lancet and Cell Press. Elsevier operates various platforms, most notably ScienceDirect, which is the largest digital distribution platform for peer-reviewed research, Scopus, a comprehensive citation database, and ClinicalKey, a clinical reference tool utilized in numerous countries.
As a subsidiary of RELX Group, Elsevier plays a significant role in the global academic landscape, accounting for a substantial portion of academic citations and research output. The company has a rich history, tracing its roots back to the work of Louis Elzevier in the 16th century and evolving through numerous mergers and expansions over the years. Today, Elsevier continues to innovate in the digital space, attracting millions of unique visitors and facilitating extensive research outputs. The organization is also noted for its engagement with the research community, having published works by nearly all Nobel Prize winners in scientific disciplines since 2000.
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Elsevier
Elsevier is one of the largest and most diverse scientific and academic publishing companies in the world. Known for The Lancet, Cell Press, ScienceDirect, SciVal, Scopus, and ClinicalKey, the Amsterdam, Netherlands–based publishing company is a subsidiary of RELX Group.
Company information
- Date founded: 1880
- Industry: Publishing
- Corporate headquarters: Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Type: Public
Overview
Elsevier is an Amsterdam, Netherlands–based publishing company focused primarily on technical, medical, and scientific platforms. The company publishes materials in both print and digital formats and began expanding into information analytics during the 2010s. The company is a subsidiary of RELX Group, a diversified London-based multinational provider of information, analytics, and legal services. RELX Group is a public company whose shares trade on the London Stock Exchange.
According to RELX Group’s 2022 annual report, Elsevier published about than 630,000 articles across 2,900 academic journals in 2023. Elsevier’s leading brands and publications include Cell Press and The Lancet. Cell Press publishes more than 50 scientific journals across branches of scholarship covering health, life, and physical sciences. The Lancet is a family of prestigious weekly, peer-reviewed medical journals established in 1823.
Much of Elsevier’s digital content is made available through its ScienceDirect portal, which is the largest platform of its kind in the publishing world. It also operates Scopus, a citation database; SciVal, a research performance database that tracks academic institutions; and ClinicalKey, a clinical reference platform used in more than ninety countries. Elsevier mainly serves academic and corporate researchers, government agencies, healthcare and scientific research institutions, and non-government organizations.
History
On its corporate website, Elsevier explains the origins and inspiration behind the modern company, tracing it to the work of Louis Elzevier. Elzevier was a Protestant bookmaker who settled in the Dutch city of Leiden in 1580 after fleeing persecution at the hands of Catholic authorities. He established a publishing business, which built an elevated reputation in academic circles over the course of the seventeenth century. Elzevier published works by leading intellectuals of the era, including Galileo Galilei and Rene Descartes. The original company operated by the Elzevier family went out of business in the eighteenth century, but it provided the inspirational spark for the present-day enterprise founded in 1880 by bookseller Jacobus Robbers and a group of investors.
Elsevier found early success with the Winkler Prins Illustrated Encyclopedia, which first appeared in 1884 and remained one of the company’s key products for more than a century. In 1928, it expanded into the publication of scientific and medical periodicals as the academic media landscape continued its evolution into new forms. During World War II (1939–1945), Elsevier established offices in London and New York in a bid to increase its presence in the English-speaking world. Following the war, Elsevier launched the Dutch-language news magazine Elsevier’s Weekly, which went on to become the highest-circulation Dutch periodical of the 1940s and 1950s. Elsevier reinvested the profits earned by the news magazine into its growing academic operations, which propelled the company into an extended period of prosperity. Elsevier established new headquarters in the Amsterdam suburbs in 1963, where it remains based today.
In 1970, Elsevier completed a merger with North-Holland Publishing Company, with the combined entity reaching the ranks of the world’s largest scientific publishers. Another merger followed in 1978, when Elsevier joined NDU, a Dutch newspaper publisher, as part of a strategy to invest in text-to-television broadcasting. Elsevier then merged with United Kingdom-based publisher Reed International in 1993, creating Reed Elsevier Group PLC. Reed Elsevier Group later changed its name to RELX Group, establishing headquarters in London. Elsevier continued to operate as an Amsterdam-based RELX Group subsidiary.
Elsevier introduced its flagship ScienceDirect platform in 1997, which has grown into the company’s signature subscription-based service. ScienceDirect holds the distinction of being the world’s first digital distribution platform for scientific books, journals, and research articles. Elsevier launched Scopus in 2004, SciVal in 2009, and ClinicalKey in 2012.
In 2013, Elsevier acquired Mendeley, a digital software product with desktop and mobile applications that facilitates research collaboration and information distribution. Over the remainder of the 2010s, Elsevier continued to focus on building out its portfolio of digital assets while continuing to expand its family of scientific and medical publications. As of 2023, Elsevier is led by Turkish-born Kumsal Bayazit, who took over as chief executive officer (CEO) in 2019. Bayazit became the first female CEO in Elsevier’s history.
Impact
Elsevier ranks among the largest and most diverse scientific and academic publishing companies in the world. RELX Group’s corporate brochure for 2021 noted that Elsevier’s family of publications combined to account for approximately 28 percent of all academic citations and about 18 percent of global scientific research output that year. The over 600,000 articles published by Elsevier in 2022 marked an over 90 percent increase from its 2010 total. The company also continued to attract higher volumes of article submissions and article usage. Researchers accessed the company’s articles 1.3 billion times in 2020, while the 2.5 million article submissions Elsevier received marked an increase of 26 percent from the previous year. This number continued to grow throughout the 2020s. Starting in 2020, Elsevier also emerged as an important repository of information related to the COVID-19 pandemic, with its Novel Coronavirus Information Center becoming the source of more than 200 million article downloads in 2020 alone.
ScienceDirect has grown into the world’s leading digital platform for peer-reviewed medical and scientific research articles. In 2023, it attracted 18 million unique monthly visitors, who accessed content from more than 43,000 electronic books and 2,650 peer-reviewed journals. In 2020, the Scopus citation database included 81 million individual records drawn from 25,000 journals and 5,000 different publishers, while in 2022, SciVal tracked the research performance of more than 20,000 institutions around the world. Used in more than 90 countries, ClinicalKey is used by nearly 2,000 North American healthcare institutions and hundreds more globally.
While these figures illustrate Elsevier’s position of leadership in the technical, medical, and scientific publishing industry, the company also highlights its high profile among elite members of the research community. Since 2000, Elsevier has published work by 99 percent of the individuals who have won a Nobel Prize in an economic or scientific field. Each year, Elsevier honors Nobel Prize laureates by offering free access to their work.
Bibliography
"About Elsevier: This Is Elsevier." Elsevier, 2024, www.elsevier.com/about/. Accessed 19 July 2024.
"About ScienceDirect." Elsevier, 2024, www.elsevier.com/solutions/sciencedirect. Accessed 19 July 2024.
“Elsevier.” CrunchBase, 2024, www.crunchbase.com/organization/elsevier. Accessed 19 July 2024.
"Fast Facts about Elsevier." Elsevier, assets.ctfassets.net/o78em1y1w4i4/76uVTUiLKsSQE4h4H1pZKq/e5ff8eef9694f216a5c29e2ebf80fa51/fast-facts-about-elsevier.pdf. Accessed 19 July 2024.
Hellinga-Querido, Lotte, et. al. The Bookshop of the World: The Role of the Low Countries in the Book-Trade, 1473–1941. Brill Academic Publishing, 2001.
“History.” Elsevier, 2024, www.elsevier.com/about/history. Accessed 19 July 2024.
“Honoring the 2022 Nobel Laureates With Free Access to Their Research.” Elsevier, 10 Oct. 2022, www.elsevier.com/connect/honoring-the-2022-nobel-laureates. Accessed 19 July 2024.
Reller, Tom and Ian Evans. “Elsevier Welcomes a New CEO.” ScienceBusiness, 18 Feb. 2019, sciencebusiness.net/network-news/elsevier-welcomes-new-ceo. Accessed 19 July 2024.
“RELX Annual Reports and Financial Statements 2020.” RELX Group, 2021, www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/reports/annual-reports/2020-annual-report.pdf. Accessed 19 July 2024.