Misplaced Pages

#548451

115-562: Elsevier ( Dutch: [ˈɛlzəviːr] ) is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as The Lancet , Cell , the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals , Trends , the Current Opinion series, the online citation database Scopus , the SciVal tool for measuring research performance,

230-539: A manuscript to a publisher, is divided into two distinct phases: peer review and production. The process of peer review is organized by the journal editor and is complete when the content of the article, together with any associated images, data, and supplementary material are accepted for publication. The peer review process is increasingly managed online, through the use of proprietary systems, commercial software packages, or open source and free software. A manuscript undergoes one or more rounds of review; after each round,

345-531: A proof reader onto a clean version of the proof. In the early 21st century, this process was streamlined by the introduction of e-annotations in Microsoft Word , Adobe Acrobat , and other programs, but it still remained a time-consuming and error-prone process. The full automation of the proof correction cycles has only become possible with the onset of online collaborative writing platforms, such as Authorea , Google Docs , Overleaf , and various others, where

460-430: A ' preprint ' or ' postprint ' copy of their paper for free download from their personal or institutional website. Some journals, particularly newer ones, are now published in electronic form only . Paper journals are now generally made available in electronic form as well, both to individual subscribers, and to libraries. Almost always these electronic versions are available to subscribers immediately upon publication of

575-688: A UK company making software for managing and sharing research papers. Mendeley, previously an open platform for sharing of research, was greatly criticized for the sale, which users saw as acceding to the " paywall " approach to research literature. Mendeley's previously open-sharing system now allows exchange of paywalled resources only within private groups. The New Yorker described Elsevier's reasons for buying Mendeley as two-fold: to acquire its user data, and to "destroy or coöpt an open-science icon that threatens its business model ". During 2018, researchers submitted over 1.8 million research papers to Elsevier-based publications. Over 20,000 editors managed

690-552: 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

805-472: A copy of their published articles available free for all on the web. Some important results in mathematics have been published only on arXiv . The Journal des sçavans (later spelled Journal des savants ), established by Denis de Sallo , was the earliest academic journal published in Europe. Its content included obituaries of famous men, church history, and legal reports. The first issue appeared as

920-438: A first tenure-track job, and a published or forthcoming book is now often required before tenure. Some critics complain that this de facto system has emerged without thought to its consequences; they claim that the predictable result is the publication of much shoddy work, as well as unreasonable demands on the already limited research time of young scholars. To make matters worse, the circulation of many humanities journals in

1035-401: A growth in academic publishing in developing countries as they become more advanced in science and technology. Although the large majority of scientific output and academic documents are produced in developed countries, the rate of growth in these countries has stabilized and is much smaller than the growth rate in some of the developing countries. The fastest scientific output growth rate over

1150-540: A hybrid option, and more are following. The fraction of the authors of a hybrid open access journal that makes use of its open access option can, however, be small. It also remains unclear whether this is practical in fields outside the sciences, where there is much less availability of outside funding. In 2006, several funding agencies , including the Wellcome Trust and several divisions of the Research Councils in

1265-457: A journal. If they publish in a Hybrid open access journal , authors or their funders pay a subscription journal a publication fee to make their individual article open access. The other articles in such hybrid journals are either made available after a delay or remain available only by subscription. Most traditional publishers (including Wiley-Blackwell , Oxford University Press , and Springer Science+Business Media ) have already introduced such

SECTION 10

#1732852010549

1380-420: A merger to form an even bigger company named Springer Nature .) Available data indicate that these companies have profit margins of around 40% making it one of the most profitable industries, especially compared to the smaller publishers, which likely operate with low margins. These factors have contributed to the " serials crisis " – total expenditures on serials increased 7.6% per year from 1986 to 2005, yet

1495-735: 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

1610-423: A new discovery to be announced as a monograph , reserving priority for the discoverer, but indecipherable for anyone not in on the secret: both Isaac Newton and Leibniz used this approach. However, this method did not work well. Robert K. Merton , a sociologist, found that 92% of cases of simultaneous discovery in the 17th century ended in dispute. The number of disputes dropped to 72% in the 18th century, 59% by

1725-425: A paper is an academic work that is usually published in an academic journal . It contains original research results or reviews existing results. Such a paper, also called an article, will only be considered valid if it undergoes a process of peer review by one or more referees (who are academics in the same field) who check that the content of the paper is suitable for publication in the journal. A paper may undergo

1840-584: 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 stated 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

1955-480: A petition advocating noncooperation with Elsevier (that is, not submitting papers to Elsevier journals, not refereeing articles in Elsevier journals, and not participating in journal editorial boards), appeared on the site "The Cost of Knowledge". By February 2012, this petition had been signed by over 5,000 academics, growing to over 17,000 by November 2018. The firm disputed the claims, claiming that their prices are below

2070-583: A range of false names to defend his editorial practice in communications with Nature , and described this behavior as "curious" and "bizarre". Elsevier's 'Duties of Authors' states that authors should ensure 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

2185-476: A remote service oversees the copy-editing interactions of multiple authors and exposes them as explicit, actionable historic events. At the end of this process, a final version of record is published. From time to time some published journal articles have been retracted for different reasons, including research misconduct. Academic authors cite sources they have used, in order to support their assertions and arguments and to help readers find more information on

2300-412: A reported profit before tax of £2,295 million with an adjusted operating margin of 33.1% in 2023. Much of the research that Elsevier publishes is publicly funded; its high costs have led to accusations of rent-seeking , boycotts, and 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

2415-672: 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. The editorial boards of a number of journals have resigned because of disputes with Elsevier over pricing: Editorial boards have also resigned over open access policies or other issues: In 2003, various university librarians began coordinating with each other to complain about Elsevier's " big deal " journal bundling packages, in which

SECTION 20

#1732852010549

2530-448: A series of reviews, revisions, and re-submissions before finally being accepted or rejected for publication. This process typically takes several months. Next, there is often a delay of many months (or in some fields, over a year) before an accepted manuscript appears. This is particularly true for the most popular journals where the number of accepted articles often outnumbers the space for printing. Due to this, many academics self-archive

2645-460: 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. 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

2760-445: A total of 27 million euros in subscription fees. Over one-third of the total costs went to Elsevier. The information was revealed after successful court appeal following a denied request on the subscription fees, due to confidentiality clauses in contracts with the publishers. Establishing of this fact lead to creation of tiedonhinta.fi petition demanding more reasonable pricing and open access to content signed by more than 2800 members of

2875-721: 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, Elsevier 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

2990-528: A twelve-page quarto pamphlet on Monday, 5 January 1665, shortly before the first appearance of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society , on 6 March 1665. The publishing of academic journals has started in the 17th century, and expanded greatly in the 19th. At that time, the act of publishing academic inquiry was controversial and widely ridiculed. It was not at all unusual for

3105-486: A way to deliver scientific articles to libraries electronically, and would continue for over a decade. In 1991, in conjunction with nine American universities, Elsevier's The University Licensing Project (TULIP) was the first step in creating published, copyrighted material available over the Internet. It formed the basis for ScienceDirect , launched six years later. In 1997, after almost two decades of experiments, ScienceDirect

3220-509: 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

3335-445: 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

3450-558: Is a central concept for most academic publishing; other scholars in a field must find a work sufficiently high in quality for it to merit publication. A secondary benefit of the process is an indirect guard against plagiarism since reviewers are usually familiar with the sources consulted by the author(s). The origins of routine peer review for submissions dates to 1752 when the Royal Society of London took over official responsibility for Philosophical Transactions. However, there were some earlier examples. While journal editors largely agree

3565-474: Is a large industry which generated $ 23.5 billion in revenue in 2011; $ 9.4 billion of that was specifically from the publication of English-language scholarly journals. The overall number of journals contained in the WOS database increased from around 8,500 in 2010 to around 9,400 in 2020, while the number of articles published increased from around 1.1 million in 2010 to 1.8 million in 2020. Most scientific research

Elsevier - Misplaced Pages Continue

3680-432: Is also a tendency for existing journals to divide into specialized sections as the field itself becomes more specialized. Along with the variation in review and publication procedures, the kinds of publications that are accepted as contributions to knowledge or research differ greatly among fields and subfields. In the sciences, the desire for statistically significant results leads to publication bias . Academic publishing

3795-434: Is also considered that "Online scientific interaction outside the traditional journal space is becoming more and more important to academic communication". In addition, experts have suggested measures to make the publication process more efficient in disseminating new and important findings by evaluating the worthiness of publication on the basis of the significance and novelty of the research finding. In academic publishing,

3910-418: Is an important aspect in peer review. The evaluation of quality of journals is based also on rejection rate . The best journals have the highest rejection rates (around 90–95%). American Psychological Association journals' rejection rates ranged "from a low of 35 per cent to a high of 85 per cent." The complement is called "acceptance rate". The process of academic publishing, which begins when authors submit

4025-486: Is as much based on peer reviewing as traditional publishing, the quality should be the same (recognizing that both traditional and open access journals have a range of quality). In several regions, including the Arab world , the majority of university academics prefer open access publishing without author fees, as it promotes equal access to information and enhances scientific advancement, a previously unexplored but crucial topic for

4140-507: Is critically important, humanities publications often take years to write and years more to publish. Unlike the sciences, research is most often an individual process and is seldom supported by large grants. Journals rarely make profits and are typically run by university departments. The following describes the situation in the United States. In many fields, such as literature and history, several published articles are typically required for

4255-437: Is in many fields of applied science, particularly that of U.S. computer science research. An equally prestigious site of publication within U.S. computer science are some academic conferences . Reasons for this departure include a large number of such conferences, the quick pace of research progress, and computer science professional society support for the distribution and archiving of conference proceedings . Since 2022,

4370-680: Is initially published in scientific journals and considered to be a primary source . Technical reports , for minor research results and engineering and design work (including computer software), round out the primary literature. Secondary sources in the sciences include articles in review journals (which provide a synthesis of research articles on a topic to highlight advances and new lines of research), and books for large projects, broad arguments, or compilations of articles. Tertiary sources might include encyclopedias and similar works intended for broad public consumption or academic libraries. A partial exception to scientific publication practices

4485-479: Is made available free for all on the web by the publisher at the time of publication. Both open and closed journals are sometimes funded by the author paying an article processing charge , thereby shifting some fees from the reader to the researcher or their funder. Many open or closed journals fund their operations without such fees and others use them in predatory publishing . The Internet has facilitated open access self-archiving , in which authors themselves make

4600-634: Is maximised because, quoting the Library of Trinity College Dublin: Open Access is often confused with specific funding models such as Article Processing Charges (APC) being paid by authors or their funders, sometimes misleadingly called "open access model". The reason this term is misleading is due to the existence of many other models, including funding sources listed in the original the Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration : "the foundations and governments that fund research,

4715-403: Is often transferred from the author to the publisher. In the late 20th century author-produced camera-ready copy has been replaced by electronic formats such as PDF . The author will review and correct proofs at one or more stages in the production process. The proof correction cycle has historically been labour-intensive as handwritten comments by authors and editors are manually transcribed by

Elsevier - Misplaced Pages Continue

4830-602: 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 signed by over 1000 people, on 17 June 2020 Elsevier announced it was retracting an article that J. Philippe Rushton and Donald Templer published in 2012 in

4945-416: Is undergoing major changes as it makes the transition from the print to the electronic format. Business models are different in the electronic environment. Since the early 1990s, licensing of electronic resources , particularly journals, has been very common. An important trend, particularly with respect to journals in the sciences, is open access via the Internet. In open access publishing, a journal article

5060-561: The American Economic Journal in 2009. RELX Group has been active in mergers and acquisitions . Elsevier has incorporated other businesses that were either complementing or competing in the field of research and publishing and that reinforce its market power , such as Mendeley (after the closure of 2collab ), SSRN , bepress / Digital Commons , PlumX , Hivebench, Newsflo, Science-Metrix, and Interfolio . Elsevier also conducts conferences, exhibitions, and workshops around

5175-512: The APA , CMS , and MLA styles. The American Psychological Association (APA) style is often used in the social sciences . The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) is used in business , communications , economics , and social sciences . The CMS style uses footnotes at the bottom of page to help readers locate the sources. The Modern Language Association (MLA) style is widely used in the humanities . Scientific, technical, and medical ( STM ) literature

5290-465: 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

5405-598: The Dutch publishing house Elzevir that was an inspiration but has no connection to the contemporary Elsevier. The Elzevir family operated as booksellers and publishers in the Netherlands ; the founder, Lodewijk Elzevir (1542–1617), lived in Leiden and established that business in 1580. As a company logo, Elsevier used the Elzevir family's printer's mark , a tree entwined with a vine and

5520-470: The European Union had a larger share of the world's total from 36.6% to 39.3% and from 32.8% to 37.5% of the "top one per cent of highly cited scientific papers". However, the United States' output dropped from 52.3% to 49.4% of the world's total, and its portion of the top one percent dropped from 65.6% to 62.8%. Iran, China, India , Brazil , and South Africa were the only developing countries among

5635-675: The Nazis occupied the Netherlands for the duration of five years from May 1940, he had just founded a second international office, the Elsevier Publishing Company Inc. in New York . In 1947, Elsevier began publishing its first English-language journal, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta . In 1971 the firm acquired Excerpta Medica ,a small medical abstract publisher based in Amsterdam . As

5750-430: The R package "statcheck". 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

5865-524: 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,

SECTION 50

#1732852010549

5980-405: The humanities is in principle similar to publishing elsewhere in the academy; a range of journals, from general to extremely specialized, are available, and university presses issue many new humanities books every year. The arrival of online publishing opportunities has radically transformed the economics of the field and the shape of the future is controversial. Unlike science, where timeliness

6095-503: 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,

6210-473: The 1990s declined to almost untenable levels, as many libraries cancelled subscriptions, leaving fewer and fewer peer-reviewed outlets for publication; and many humanities professors' first books sell only a few hundred copies, which often does not pay for the cost of their printing. Some scholars have called for a publication subvention of a few thousand dollars to be associated with each graduate student fellowship or new tenure-track hire, in order to alleviate

6325-432: The 2010s, libraries began more aggressive cost cutting with the leverage of open access and open data . Data analysis with open source tools like Unpaywall Journals empowered library systems in reducing their subscription costs by 70% with the cancellation of the big deal with publishers like Elsevier . Several models are being investigated, such as open publication models or adding community-oriented features. It

6440-526: The 31 nations that produced 97.5% of the most cited scientific articles in a study published in 2004. The remaining 162 countries contributed less than 2.5%. The Royal Society in a 2011 report stated that in share of English scientific research papers the United States was first followed by China, the UK, Germany, Japan, France, and Canada. The report predicted that China would overtake the United States sometime before 2020, possibly as early as 2013. China's scientific impact, as measured by other scientists citing

6555-451: The APC model often charge several thousand dollars. Oxford University Press, with over 300 journals, has fees ranging from £1000-£2500, with discounts of 50% to 100% to authors from developing countries. Wiley Blackwell has 700 journals available, and they charge different amounts for each journal. Springer, with over 2600 journals, charges US$ 3000 or EUR 2200 (excluding VAT). A study found that

6670-697: The ARL found that in "1986, libraries spent 44% of their budgets on books compared with 56% on journals; twelve years later, the ratio had skewed to 28% and 72%." Meanwhile, monographs are increasingly expected for tenure in the humanities. In 2002 the Modern Language Association expressed hope that electronic publishing would solve the issue. In 2009 and 2010, surveys and reports found that libraries faced continuing budget cuts, with one survey in 2009 finding that 36% of UK libraries had their budgets cut by 10% or more, compared to 29% with increased budgets. In

6785-684: The Belgian web portal Cairn.info is open to STM. Publishing in the social sciences is very different in different fields. Some fields, like economics, may have very "hard" or highly quantitative standards for publication, much like the natural sciences. Others, like anthropology or sociology, emphasize field work and reporting on first-hand observation as well as quantitative work. Some social science fields, such as public health or demography , have significant shared interests with professions like law and medicine , and scholars in these fields often also publish in professional magazines . Publishing in

6900-836: The ClinicalKey search engine for clinicians, and the ClinicalPath evidence-based cancer care service. Elsevier's products and services include digital tools for data management , instruction, research analytics, and assessment. Elsevier is part of the RELX Group , known until 2015 as Reed Elsevier, a publicly traded company. According to RELX reports, in 2022 Elsevier published more than 600,000 articles annually in over 2,800 journals; as of 2018 its archives contained over 17 million documents and 40,000 e-books , with over one billion annual downloads. Researchers have criticized Elsevier for its high profit margins and copyright practices . The company had

7015-611: 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. One of their journals, Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis , was involved in the manipulation of the peer review report. 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

SECTION 60

#1732852010549

7130-528: The Research Works Act. Although the Cost of Knowledge movement was not mentioned, the statement indicated the hope that the move would "help create a less heated and more productive climate" for ongoing discussions with research funders. Hours after Elsevier's statement, the sponsors of the bill, US House Representatives Darrell Issa and Carolyn Maloney , issued a joint statement saying that they would not push

7245-662: The UK announced the availability of extra funding to their grantees for such open access journal publication fees. In May 2016, the Council for the European Union agreed that from 2020 all scientific publications as a result of publicly funded research must be freely available. It also must be able to optimally reuse research data. To achieve that, the data must be made accessible, unless there are well-founded reasons for not doing so, for example, intellectual property rights or security or privacy issues. In recent decades there has been

7360-558: 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

7475-619: The abstract of one of its articles. It is unclear whether or not Muka had access to the entirety of the article. 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

7590-454: The apparent crisis has to do with the combined pressure of budget cuts at universities and increased costs for journals (the serials crisis ). The university budget cuts have reduced library budgets and reduced subsidies to university-affiliated publishers. The humanities have been particularly affected by the pressure on university publishers, which are less able to publish monographs when libraries can not afford to purchase them. For example,

7705-522: The articles to open and accessible datasets, and (perhaps most importantly) arranging and managing scholarly peer review. The latter is a task that should not be underestimated as it effectively entails coercing busy people into giving their time to improve someone else's work and maintain the quality of the literature. Not to mention the standard management processes for large enterprises, including infrastructure, people, security, and marketing. All of these factors contribute in one way or another to maintaining

7820-460: The author(s) of the article modify their submission in line with the reviewers' comments; this process is repeated until the editor is satisfied and the work is accepted . The production process, controlled by a production editor or publisher, then takes an article through copy editing , typesetting , inclusion in a specific issue of a journal, and then printing and online publication. Academic copy editing seeks to ensure that an article conforms to

7935-621: The average APC (ensuring open access) was between $ 1,418 and US$ 2,727. The online distribution of individual articles and academic journals then takes place without charge to readers and libraries. Most open access journals remove all the financial, technical, and legal barriers Archived 2021-05-06 at the Wayback Machine that limit access to academic materials to paying customers. The Public Library of Science and BioMed Central are prominent examples of this model. Fee-based open access publishing has been criticized on quality grounds, as

8050-590: The bibliographic metadata are free to read. ScienceDirect was launched by Elsevier in March 1997. The journals are grouped into four main sections: Article abstracts are freely available, and access to their full texts (in PDF and, for newer publications, also HTML ) generally requires a subscription or pay-per-view purchase unless the content is freely available in open access. Papers published under several open access licenses available on ScienceDirect without cost. On

8165-605: The bill in Congress. The Plan S open-access initiative, which began in Europe and has since spread to some US research funding agencies, would require researchers receiving some grants to publish in open-access journals by 2020. A spokesman for Elsevier said "If you think that information should be free of charge, go to Misplaced Pages ". In September 2018, UBS advised to sell Elsevier (RELX) stocks, noting that Plan S could affect 5-10% of scientific funding and may force Elsevier to reduce pricing. In 2015, Finnish research organizations paid

8280-439: The commercial publishers raised the subscription prices significantly, they lost little of the market, due to the inelastic demand for these journals. Although there are over 2,000 publishers, five for-profit companies ( Reed Elsevier , Springer Science+Business Media , Wiley-Blackwell , Taylor & Francis , and SAGE ) accounted for 50% of articles published in 2013. (Since 2013, Springer Science+Business Media has undergone

8395-509: The company offered a group of journal subscriptions to libraries at a certain rate, but in which librarians claimed no economical option was available to subscribe to only the popular journals at a rate comparable to the bundled rate. Librarians continued to discuss the implications of the pricing schemes, many feeling pressured into buying the Elsevier packages without other options. On 21 January 2012, mathematician Timothy Gowers publicly announced he would boycott Elsevier, noting that others in

8510-485: The desire to maximize publishing fees could cause some journals to relax the standard of peer review. Although, similar desire is also present in the subscription model, where publishers increase numbers or published articles in order to justify raising their fees. It may be criticized on financial grounds as well because the necessary publication or subscription fees have proven to be higher than originally expected. Open access advocates generally reply that because open access

8625-461: The dramatic increase in opportunities to publish results online has led to a decline in the use of peer-reviewed articles. An academic paper typically belongs to some particular category such as: Note: Law review is the generic term for a journal of legal scholarship in the United States , often operating by rules radically different from those for most other academic journals. Peer review

8740-500: The editor of Philosophical Transaction's 1796 rejection of Edward Jenner 's report of the first vaccination against smallpox . "Confirmatory bias" is the unconscious tendency to accept reports which support the reviewer's views and to downplay those which do not. Experimental studies show the problem exists in peer reviewing. There are various types of peer review feedback that may be given prior to publication, including but not limited to: The possibility of rejections of papers

8855-484: The field have been doing so privately. The reasons for the boycott are high subscription prices for individual journals, bundling subscriptions to journals of different value and importance, and Elsevier's support for SOPA , PIPA , and the Research Works Act , which would have prohibited open-access mandates for U.S. federally-funded research and severely restricted the sharing of scientific data. Following this,

8970-506: The financial pressure on journals. Under Open Access, the content can be freely accessed and reused by anyone in the world using an Internet connection. The terminology going back to Budapest Open Access Initiative , Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities , and Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing . The impact of the work available as Open Access

9085-603: The first and only company in the world that employed a database for the production of journals, it introduced computer technology to Elsevier. 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 1979 Elsevier Science Publishers launched the Article Delivery Over Network Information System (ADONIS) project in conjunction with four business partners. The project aims to find

9200-460: The fossil fuel industry to help "increase the odds of exploration success". 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

9315-443: The imprint's web page. In October 2010, Excerpta Medica was acquired by Adelphi Worldwide. 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

9430-459: The industry average, and stating that bundling is only one of several different options available to buy access to Elsevier journals. The company also claimed that its profit margins are "simply a consequence of the firm's efficient operation". The academics replied that their work was funded by public money, thus should be freely available. On 27 February 2012, Elsevier issued a statement on its website that declared that it has withdrawn support from

9545-418: The journal's house style , that all of the referencing and labelling is correct, and that the text is consistent and legible; often this work involves substantive editing and negotiating with the authors. Because the work of academic copy editors can overlap with that of authors' editors , editors employed by journal publishers often refer to themselves as "manuscript editors". During this process, copyright

9660-514: The last two decades has been in the Middle East and Asia with Iran leading with an 11-fold increase followed by the Republic of Korea, Turkey, Cyprus, China, and Oman. In comparison, the only G8 countries in top 20 ranking with fastest performance improvement are, Italy which stands at tenth and Canada at 13th globally. By 2004, it was noted that the output of scientific papers originating from

9775-496: The latter half of the 19th century, and 33% by the first half of the 20th century. The decline in contested claims for priority in research discoveries can be credited to the increasing acceptance of the publication of papers in modern academic journals, with estimates suggesting that around 50 million journal articles have been published since the first appearance of the Philosophical Transactions . The Royal Society

9890-451: 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. Elsevier seeks to regulate text and data mining with private licenses, claiming that reading requires extra permission if automated and that

10005-489: The number of serials purchased increased an average of only 1.9% per year. Unlike most industries, in academic publishing the two most important inputs are provided "virtually free of charge". These are the articles and the peer review process. Publishers argue that they add value to the publishing process through support to the peer review group, including stipends, as well as through typesetting, printing, and web publishing. Investment analysts, however, have been skeptical of

10120-855: The other hand, access to the full-text pdfs of non- open access publons required either a subscription (to the specific journal rather than to the whole database) or per-article/book payment. to the overall offering hosted on ScienceDirect, rather than to specific titles it carries, are usually acquired through a so called big deal . The other big five have similar offers. ScienceDirect also competes for audience with other large aggregators and hosts of scholarly communication content such as academic social network ResearchGate and open access repository arXiv , as well as with fully open access publishing venues and mega journals like PLOS . ScienceDirect also carries Cell . The search and bibliographic export options of ScienceDirect are very limited. For better search capabilities Elsevier provides via internet

10235-403: The paper version, or even before; sometimes they are also made available to non-subscribers, either immediately (by open access journals ) or after an embargo of anywhere from two to twenty-four months or more, in order to protect against loss of subscriptions. Journals having this delayed availability are sometimes called delayed open access journals . Ellison in 2011 reported that in economics

10350-1457: 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. 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 such as 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

10465-461: 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

10580-513: The peer-reviewed literature. At that 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

10695-520: 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. ),

10810-505: The published papers the next year, is smaller although also increasing. Developing countries continue to find ways to improve their share, given research budget constraints and limited resources. There is increasing frustration amongst OA advocates, with what is perceived as resistance to change on the part of many of the established academic publishers. Publishers are often accused of capturing and monetising publicly funded research, using free academic labour for peer review, and then selling

10925-401: 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

11040-519: The region's higher education. It has also been argued that good science done by academic institutions who cannot afford to pay for open access might not get published at all, but most open access journals permit the waiver of the fee for financial hardship or authors in underdeveloped countries . In any case, all authors have the option of self-archiving their articles in their institutional repositories or disciplinary repositories in order to make them open access , whether or not they publish them in

11155-459: The research community. While deals with other publishers have been made, this was not the case for Elsevier, leading to the nodealnoreview.org boycott of the publisher signed more than 600 times. Academic publishing Most established academic disciplines have their own journals and other outlets for publication, although many academic journals are somewhat interdisciplinary , and publish work from several distinct fields or subfields. There

11270-501: The resulting publications back to academia at inflated profits. Such frustrations sometimes spill over into hyperbole, of which "publishers add no value" is one of the most common examples. However, scholarly publishing is not a simple process, and publishers do add value to scholarly communication as it is currently designed. Kent Anderson maintains a list of things that journal publishers do which currently contains 102 items and has yet to be formally contested from anyone who challenges

11385-484: The scholarly record. ScienceDirect ScienceDirect is a searcheable web-based bibliographic database , which provides access to full texts of scientific and medical publications of the Dutch publisher Elsevier as well of several small academic publishers . It hosts over 18 million publons from more than 4,000 academic journals and 30,000 e-books . The access to the full-text requires subscription, while

11500-472: The subject. It also gives credit to authors whose work they use and helps avoid plagiarism . The topic of dual publication (also known as self-plagiarism) has been addressed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), as well as in the research literature itself. Each scholarly journal uses a specific format for citations (also known as references). Among the most common formats used in research papers are

11615-468: The system is essential to quality control in terms of rejecting poor quality work, there have been examples of important results that are turned down by one journal before being taken to others. Rena Steinzor wrote: Perhaps the most widely recognized failing of peer review is its inability to ensure the identification of high-quality work. The list of important scientific papers that were initially rejected by peer-reviewed journals goes back at least as far as

11730-553: The universities and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves". For more recent open public discussion of open access funding models, see Flexible membership funding model for Open Access publishing with no author-facing charges . Prestige journals using

11845-415: The value added by for-profit publishers, as exemplified by a 2005 Deutsche Bank analysis which stated that "we believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process... We are simply observing that if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available." A crisis in academic publishing is "widely perceived";

11960-468: The value of publishers. Many items on the list could be argued to be of value primarily to the publishers themselves, e.g. "Make money and remain a constant in the system of scholarly output". However, others provide direct value to researchers and research in steering the academic literature. This includes arbitrating disputes (e.g. over ethics, authorship), stewarding the scholarly record, copy-editing, proofreading, type-setting, styling of materials, linking

12075-473: The western monopoly of science-publishing, "by August 2021, at least 210,000 new papers on covid-19 had been published, according to a Royal Society study. Of the 720,000-odd authors of these papers, nearly 270,000 were from the US, the UK, Italy or Spain." In the 1960s and 1970s, commercial publishers began to selectively acquire "top-quality" journals that were previously published by nonprofit academic societies. When

12190-401: The words Non Solus , which is Latin for "not alone". According to Elsevier, this logo represents "the symbiotic relationship between publisher and scholar". The expansion of Elsevier in the scientific field after 1945 was funded with the profits of the newsweekly Elsevier , which published its first issue on 27 October 1945. The weekly was an instant success and very profitable. The weekly

12305-545: The world, with over 50 conferences a year covering life sciences, physical sciences and engineering, social sciences, and health sciences. 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 US books retailer) and give it five stars. Elsevier responded by stating "Encouraging interested parties to post book reviews isn't outside

12420-701: 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 . In May 1939 Klautz established the Elsevier Publishing Company Ltd. in London to distribute these academic titles in the British Commonwealth (except Canada). When

12535-399: Was also launched in 2004). Scopus covers journals, some conference papers and books from various publishers, and measures performance on both author and publication levels. In 2009 SciVal Spotlight was released. This tool enabled research administrators to measure their institution's relative standing in terms of productivity, grants, and publications . In 2013, Elsevier acquired Mendeley ,

12650-516: 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. 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

12765-668: 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

12880-477: 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

12995-471: Was launched as the first online repository of electronic (scientific) books and articles. Though librarians and researchers were initially hesitant regarding the new technology, more and more of them switched to e-only subscriptions. In 2004 Elsevier launched Scopus - a multidisciplinary metadata database of scholarly publications, only the second of such kind (after the Web of Science , although free Google Scholar

13110-541: Was not until the middle of the 20th century that peer review became the standard. The COVID-19 pandemic hijacked the entire world of basic and clinical science, with unprecedented shifts in funding priorities worldwide and a boom in medical publishing, accompanied by an unprecedented increase in the number of publications. Preprints servers become much popular during the pandemic, the Covid situation has an impact also on traditional peer-review . The pandemic has also deepened

13225-462: Was steadfast in its not-yet-popular belief that science could only move forward through a transparent and open exchange of ideas backed by experimental evidence. Early scientific journals embraced several models: some were run by a single individual who exerted editorial control over the contents, often simply publishing extracts from colleagues' letters, while others employed a group decision-making process, more closely aligned to modern peer review. It

#548451