During 2018, researchers submitted over 1.8 million research papers to Elsevier-based publications. Over 20,000 editors managed the peer review and selection of these papers, resulting in the publication of more than 470,000 articles in over 2,500 journals. Editors are generally unpaid volunteers who perform their duties alongside a full-time job in academic institutions, although exceptions have been reported. In 2013, the five editorial groups Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, and SAGE Publications published more than half of all academic papers in the peer-reviewed literature. At the time, Elsevier accounted for 16% of the world market in science, technology, and medical publishing. In 2019, Elsevier accounted for the review, editing and dissemination of 18% of the world's scientific articles. About 45% of revenue by geography in 2019 derived from North America, 24% from Europe, and the remaining 31% from the rest of the world. Around 84% of revenue by format came from electronic usage and 16% came from print.
The firm employs 8,100 people. The CEO is Kumsal Bayazit, who was appointed on 15 February 2019. In 2018, it reported a mean 2017 gender pay gap of 29.1% for its UK workforce, while the median was 40.4%, the highest yet reported by a publisher in UK. Elsevier attributed the result to the under-representation of women in its senior ranks and the prevalence of men in its technical workforce. The UK workforce consists of 1,200 people in the UK, and represents 16% of Elsevier's global employee population. Elsevier's parent company, RELX, has a global workforce that is 51% female to 49% male, with 43% female and 57% male managers, and 29% female and 71% male senior operational managers.
In 2018, Elsevier accounted for 34% of the revenues of RELX group (£2.538 billion of £7.492 billion). In operating profits, it represented 40% (£942 million of £2,346 million). Adjusted operating profits (with constant currency) rose by 2% from 2017 to 2018. Profits grew further from 2018 to 2019, to a total of £982 million. The first half of 2019, RELX reported the first slowdown in revenue growth for Elsevier in several years: 1% vs. an expectation of 2% and a typical growth of at least 4% in the previous 5 years. Overall for 2019, Elsevier reported revenue growth of 3.9% from 2018, with the underlying growth at constant currency at 2%. In 2019, the company accounted for 34% of the revenues of RELX (£2.637billion of £7.874billion). In adjusted operating profits, it represented 39% (£982m of £2.491bn). Adjusted operating profits (with constant currency) rose by 2% from 2018 to 2019. In 2019, researchers submitted over two million research papers to Elsevier-based publications. Over 22,000 editors managed the peer review and selection of these papers, resulting in the publication of about 500,000 articles in over 2,500 journals.
In 2020, Elsevier was the largest academic publisher, with approximately 16% of the academic publishing market and more than 3000 journals.
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Imprints
Elsevier uses its imprints (that is, brand names used in publishing) to market to different consumer segments. Many of the imprints have previously been the names of publishing companies which were purchased by Reed Elsevier.
Conferences
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.
Market model
Products and services
Products and services include electronic and print versions of journals, textbooks and reference works, and cover the health, life, physical, and social sciences.
The target markets are academic and government research institutions, corporate research labs, booksellers, librarians, scientific researchers, authors, editors, physicians, nurses, allied health professionals, medical and nursing students and schools, medical researchers, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and research establishments. It publishes in 13 languages including English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Japanese, Hindi, and Chinese.
Flagship products and services include VirtualE, ScienceDirect, Scopus, Scirus, EMBASE, Engineering Village, Compendex, Cell, Knovel, SciVal, Pure, and Analytical Services, The Consult series (FirstCONSULT, PathCONSULT, NursingCONSULT, MDConsult, StudentCONSULT), Virtual Clinical Excursions, and major reference works including Gray's Anatomy, Nelson Pediatrics, Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary, Netter's Atlas of Human Anatomy, and online versions of many journals including The Lancet.
ScienceDirect is Elsevier's platform for online electronic access to its journals and over 40,000 e-books, reference works, book series, and handbooks. The articles are grouped in four main sections: Physical Sciences and Engineering, Life Sciences, Health Sciences, and Social Sciences and Humanities. For most articles on the website, abstracts are freely available; access to the full text of the article (in PDF, and also HTML for newer publications) often requires a subscription or pay-per-view purchase.
In 2019, Elsevier published 49,000 free open access articles and 370 full open access journals. Moreover, 1,900 of its journals sold hybrid open access options.
Pricing
The subscription rates charged by the company for its journals have been criticized; some very large journals (with more than 5,000 articles) charge subscription prices as high as £9,634, far above average, and many British universities pay more than a million pounds to Elsevier annually. The company has been criticized not only by advocates of a switch to the open-access publication model, but also by universities whose library budgets make it difficult for them to afford current journal prices.
For example, in 2004, a resolution by Stanford University's senate singled out Elsevier's journals as being "disproportionately expensive compared to their educational and research value", which librarians should consider dropping, and encouraged its faculty "not to contribute articles or editorial or review efforts to publishers and journals that engage in exploitive or exorbitant pricing". Similar guidelines and criticism of Elsevier's pricing policies have been passed by the University of California, Harvard University, and Duke University.
In July 2015, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands threatened to boycott Elsevier, which refused to negotiate on any open access policy for Dutch universities. After a year of negotiation, Elsevier pledged to make 30% of research published by Dutch researchers in Elsevier journals open access by 2018. 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. The European Commission decided not to investigate.
The elevated pricing of field journals in economics, most of which are published by Elsevier, was one of the motivations that moved the American Economic Association to launch the American Economic Journal in 2009.
Mergers and acquisitions
RELX Group has been active in mergers and acquisitions. Elsevier has incorporated other businesses which were either complementing or competing in the field of research and publishing and that reinforce its market power including Mendeley (after the closure of 2collab), SSRN, bepress/Digital Commons, PlumX, Hivebench, Newsflo, Science-Metrix, and Interfolio.
Elsevier's new business model resulting from these mergers and acquisitions has been described as "surveillance publishing" or "people farming."
Awards
Elsevier has partnered with a number of organisations and lent its name to several awards. Since 1987, Elsevier has partnered with the academic journal Spectrochimica Acta Part B to award the Elsevier / Spectrochimica Acta Atomic Spectroscopy Award. This award is given each year for a jury-selected best paper of the year. The award is worth $1000.
Starting in 1987, the IBMS Elsevier Award was awarded in 1992, 1995, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2005, and 2007 by the International Bone and Mineral Society in partnership with Elsevier, "for outstanding research and teaching throughout their career by an IBMS member in the fields of bone and mineral metabolism".
From 2007, the Coordenação de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) in Brazil partnered with Elsevier to award the CAPES Elsevier Award, the award being restricted to women from 2013 to encourage more women to pursue scientific careers. Several awards were awarded each year, as of 2014.
From 2011, the OWSD-Elsevier Foundation Awards for Early-Career Women Scientists in the Developing World (OWSD-Elsevier Foundation Awards) have been awarded annually to early-career women scientists in selected developing countries in four regions: Latin America and the Caribbean; East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific; Central and South Asia; and Sub-Saharan Africa. The Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD), the Elsevier Foundation, and The World Academy of Sciences first partnered to recognize achievements of early-career women scientists in developing countries in 2011.
In 2016, the Elsevier Foundation awarded the Elsevier Foundation-ISC3 Green and Sustainable Chemistry Challenge. From 2021 and as of 2024, the annual award is known as the Elsevier Foundation Chemistry for Climate Action Challenge. Two prizes have been awarded each year; until 2020, the first prizewinner was awarded €50,000, and the second prize was €25,000. Since then, €25,000 has been awarded to each winner, usually an entrepreneur who has created a project or proposal that aids the fight against climate change.
Shill review offer
According to the BBC, in 2009, the firm [Elsevier] offered a £17.25 Amazon voucher to academics who contributed to the textbook Clinical Psychology if they would go on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble (a large U.S. books retailer) and give it five stars. Elsevier responded, "Encouraging interested parties to post book reviews isn't outside the norm in scholarly publishing, nor is it wrong to offer to nominally compensate people for their time. But in all instances the request should be unbiased, with no incentives for a positive review, and that's where this particular e-mail went too far", and that it was a mistake by a marketing employee.
Blocking text mining research
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. The conflict on research and copyright policy has often resulted in researchers being blocked from their work. In November 2015, Elsevier blocked a scientist from performing text mining research at scale on Elsevier papers, even though his institution already pays for access to Elsevier journal content. The data was collected using the R package "statcheck".
Fossil fuel company consulting and advocacy
Elsevier is one of the most prolific publishers of books aimed at expanding the production of fossil fuels. Since at least 2010 the company has worked with the fossil fuel industry to optimise fossil fuel extraction. It commissions authors, journal advisory board members and editors who are employees of the largest oil firms. In addition it markets data services and research portals directly to the fossil fuel industry to help "increase the odds of exploration success".
Others
In May 2026, major publishers including Elsevier sued Meta Platforms, alleging that Meta used their books and journal articles, without their permission, to train Llama.
Business practices and editorial standards
"Who's Afraid of Peer Review"
In 2013, one of Elsevier's journals was caught in the sting set up by John Bohannon, published in Science, called "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" The journal Drug Invention Today accepted an obviously bogus paper made up by Bohannon that should have been rejected by any good peer-review system. Instead, Drug Invention Today was among many open-access journals that accepted the fake paper for publication. As of 2014, this journal had been transferred to a different publisher.
Fake journals
At a 2009 court case in Australia where Merck & Co. 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, which had the appearance of being a peer-reviewed academic journal but in fact contained only articles favourable to Merck drugs. Merck described the journal as a "complimentary publication", denied claims that articles within it were ghost written by Merck, and said that the articles were all reprinted from peer-reviewed medical journals. In May 2009, Elsevier Health Sciences CEO Hansen released a statement regarding Australia-based sponsored journals, conceding that they were "sponsored article compilation publications, on behalf of pharmaceutical clients, that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures". The statement acknowledged that it "was an unacceptable practice". The Scientist reported that, according to an Elsevier spokesperson, six sponsored publications "were put out by their Australia office and bore the Excerpta Medica imprint from 2000 to 2005", namely the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine (Australas. J. Bone Joint Med.), the Australasian Journal of General Practice (Australas. J. Gen. Pract.), the Australasian Journal of Neurology (Australas. J. Neurol.), the Australasian Journal of Cardiology (Australas. J. Cardiol.), the Australasian Journal of Clinical Pharmacy (Australas. J. Clin. Pharm.), and the Australasian Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine (Australas. J. Cardiovasc. Med.). Excerpta Medica was a "strategic medical communications agency" run by Elsevier, according to the imprint's web page. In October 2010, Excerpta Medica was acquired by Adelphi Worldwide.
Chaos, Solitons & Fractals
There was speculation that the editor-in-chief of Elsevier journal Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Mohamed El Naschie, misused his power to publish his own work without appropriate peer review. The journal had published 322 papers with El Naschie as author since 1993. The last issue of December 2008 featured five of his papers. The controversy was covered extensively in blogs. The publisher announced in January 2009 that El Naschie had retired as editor-in-chief. As of November 2011 the co-Editors-in-Chief of the journal were Maurice Courbage and Paolo Grigolini. In June 2011, El Naschie sued the journal Nature for libel, claiming that his reputation had been damaged by their November 2008 article about his retirement, which included statements that Nature had been unable to verify his claimed affiliations with certain international institutions. The suit came to trial in November 2011 and was dismissed in July 2012, with the judge ruling that the article was "substantially true", contained "honest comment", and was "the product of responsible journalism". The judgement noted that El Naschie, who represented himself in court, had failed to provide any documentary evidence that his papers had been peer-reviewed. Judge Victoria Sharp also found "reasonable and serious grounds" for suspecting that El Naschie used a range of false names to defend his editorial practice in communications with Nature, and described this behavior as "curious" and "bizarre".
Plagiarism
Elsevier's 'Duties of Authors' says that authors should ensure that they have written entirely original works, and that proper acknowledgement of others' work must always be given. Elsevier claims plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical behaviour. Some Elsevier journals automatically screen submissions for plagiarism, but not all.
Albanian politician Taulant Muka claimed that Elsevier journal Procedia had plagiarized in the abstract of one of its articles. It is unclear whether or not Muka had access to the entirety of the article.
Scientific racism
Angela Saini has criticized the two Elsevier journals Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences for having included on their editorial boards such well-known proponents of scientific racism as Richard Lynn and Gerhard Meisenberg; in response to her inquiries, Elsevier defended their presence as editors. The journal Intelligence has been criticized for having "occasionally included papers with pseudoscientific findings about intelligence differences between races". It is the official journal of the International Society for Intelligence Research, which organizes the controversial series of conferences London Conference on Intelligence, described by the New Statesman as a forum for scientific racism.
In response to a 2019 open letter, efforts by Retraction Watch and a petition, on 17 June 2020 Elsevier announced it was retracting an article that J. Philippe Rushton and Donald Templer published in 2012 in the Elsevier journal Personality and Individual Differences. The article had claimed that there was scientific evidence that skin color was related to aggression and sexuality in humans.
Manipulation of bibliometrics
According to the signatories of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (see also Goodhart's law), commercial academic publishers benefit from manipulation of bibliometrics and scientometrics, such as the journal impact factor. The impact factor, which is often used as a proxy of prestige, can influence revenues, subscriptions, and academics' willingness to contribute unpaid work. However, there's evidence suggesting that reliability of published research works in several fields may decrease with increasing journal rank.
Nine Elsevier journals, which exhibited unusual levels of self-citation, had their journal impact factor of 2019 suspended from Journal Citation Reports in 2020, a sanction that hit 34 journals in total.
In 2023, the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, which is published by Elsevier, was criticized for desk-rejecting a submitted article for the main reason that it did not cite enough articles from the same journal. One of their journals, Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis, was involved in the manipulation of the peer review report.
In 2024, "Scholarly Criticism", an academic research watchdog, reported on the impacts of the inclusion in Elsevier's Scopus of the megajournal Heliyon, which started publishing in 2015 and was attributed a CiteScore in 2016 or earlier.
Climate change
Elsevier publishes research by climate change researchers in many of its journals, but also publishes books for the fossil fuel industry about expanding production, as well as other products such as a geomapping tool to help find oil and gas reserves. Climate scientists are concerned that this conflict of interest could undermine the credibility of climate science because they believe that fossil fuel extraction and climate action are incompatible.
Involvement in international arms trade
Elsevier organized international arms fairs until 2007, when they announced they would no longer do so, after various protests and calls to boycott their journals.
Antitrust lawsuit
In September 2024, Lucina Uddin, a neuroscience professor at UCLA, sued Elsevier along with five other academic journal publishers in a proposed class-action lawsuit, alleging that the publishers violated antitrust law by agreeing not to compete against each other for manuscripts and by denying scholars payment for peer review services. In January 2026, the U.S. District Judge dismissed the suit on the basis that it did not "plausibly allege an unlawful agreement under antitrust laws". The plaintiffs, by the time of the dismissal, had not made specific, factual allegations in either their initial filing or their Opposition, despite requesting leave to amend. In fact, the plaintiffs explicitly indicated that they would not attempt to argue or demonstrate an explicit agreement between the publishers.
