Elsevier
Elsevier provides its customers with scientific, technical and medical content and tools that improve productivity in research, healthcare and health education. Total revenues for the year ended 31 December 2008 were £1,700m.
Elsevier is a global business with principal operations located in Amsterdam, London, Oxford, New York, Philadelphia, St Louis, San Diego, Boston, Paris, Munich, Madrid, Singapore, Tokyo, Delhi and Chennai.
Elsevier serves a global network of 7,000 editors, 70,000 editorial board members, 300,000 reviewers, and more than 600,000 authors. Its products reach more than 12 million researchers in 4,500 institutions, 5 million students, and 15 million doctors, nurses and health professionals.
Growth in the scientific information market is driven by increases in research output, R&D spend, the number of researchers worldwide, and the need for improved research efficiency. In healthcare, growth is driven by advances in medical science and the shift from activity-based to outcomes-based models of patient care and associated demands for increased productivity.
The Science & Technology division of Elsevier is the world’s leading global academic journal publisher. Its customers are the world’s libraries, scientists, professionals, and corporations, who rely on Elsevier to provide high quality content; to review, publish, disseminate, and preserve research findings; and to create innovative workflow tools to improve their efficiency in using that information. Each year Science & Technology publishes over 200,000 new research articles in some 1,100 journals and over 1,000 new book titles, as well as secondary material in the form of supporting bibliographic data, indexes and abstracts, and tertiary information in the form of review and reference works.
Science & Technology has two flagship electronic solutions: ScienceDirect and Scopus. ScienceDirect is the world’s largest database of scientific, technical and medical journal articles and is accessed by over 11 million users each year. ScienceDirect holds over nine million scientific articles and an expanding portfolio of books online. Currently ScienceDirect has just over 10,000 books titles, which includes 75 major reference works, over 70 book series, seven handbooks totalling over 190 volumes and more than 4,700 e-books, with some 500 e-books being added to ScienceDirect each year. Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of research literature from over 4,000 different publishers. Scopus has more than 37 million records of scientific research articles from over 15,000 peer reviewed journals, more than 23 million patents, and references to over 434 million web pages.
Science & Technology’s growing online offering also includes Illumin8, an online workflow solution for corporate scientists, engineers and R&D professionals.
In 2009 Science & Technology will launch specific workflow solutions for researchers and research administrators. The initial offering will include a funding intelligence tool and a research performance tool.
The Health Sciences division of Elsevier serves medical researchers, practising health professionals, payers, educators, students and pharma professionals globally. It publishes over 700 journals, including a number of journals for learned societies, and over 2,000 book titles and clinical reference works annually. Growth in electronic health information is accelerating and the business continues to expand its portfolio of online health information tools for education, practitioner reference, and point of care decision making. Elsevier’s clinical reference and decision support products include MDConsult, which now has over nine million page views per month and more than 1,700 institutional customers. Health Sciences provides online and multimedia products for use by both medical faculties and students to support core textbooks, including Evolve, which now has 1.4 million registered users and, through Health Education Systems Inc, testing tools for nursing and allied health markets. Internationally, Elsevier leverages its print and online content into new markets through foreign language versions.
Elsevier aims to make valued contributions to the science and health communities by combining world class content with productivity enhancing solutions for scientific researchers and health professionals worldwide. Its key strategic areas of focus are: quality of content; customer service and customer relations; development of productivity enhancing online solutions; expanded penetration of high growth markets; and organisational efficiency.
Elsevier’s print science journals are generally sold to libraries on a paid subscription basis, with subscription agents facilitating the administrative process. Medical and healthcare print journals are mostly sold to individuals through direct mail and learned societies. Electronic products are generally sold directly to institutional libraries, hospitals, corporations and end users. Books are sold through book stores, both traditional and online, wholesalers and, particularly in medical and healthcare markets, directly to end users. Competition within the science and technology and medical publishing fields is generally on a title by title and product by product basis. Competing journals, books and databases are typically published by learned societies and other professional publishers.