Elsevier

Elsevier

Elsevier B.V. is a publishing company which publishes medical and scientific literature. It is a part of the Reed Elsevier group. Based in Amsterdam, the company has operations in the United Kingdom, USA, and elsewhere.

Leading products include journals such as The Lancet and Cell, books such as Gray's Anatomy, the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, the Trends and Current Opinion series of journals, and the online citation database Scopus. Its free researcher collaboration tool, 2collab, launched in 2007, was discontinued in 2011.

Elsevier publishes 250,000 articles a year in 2,000 journals. Its archives contain seven million publications. Total yearly downloads amount to 240 million. The company is currently being boycotted by academics who object to its business model, which includes "paywalls" and (in their opinion) excessively high subscription charges.

In 2010, Elsevier reported a profit margin of 36% on revenues of $3.2 billion. Elsevier accounts for 28% of the revenues of the Reed Elsevier group (₤1.5b of 5.4 billions in 2006). In operating profits, it represents a bigger fraction of 44% (₤395 of 880 millions). Adjusted operating profits rose by 10% from 2005 to 2006.