Elsevier borrowed a 16th-century printer's name and built a scientific publishing giant
Elsevier's logo, an elm entwined with a vine above the words Non Solus, came from the Elzevirs, Dutch printers of the 1500s. The modern firm, founded in 1880, has no link to them beyond the name. It now handles roughly a sixth of the world's scholarly publishing, with margins that critics find hard to forgive.
The Elzevir business was started in Leiden in 1580 by Lodewijk Elzevir. The company that borrowed his family's mark says its motto, meaning not alone, stands for the partnership between publisher and scholar. After 1945 its scientific expansion was bankrolled by a hugely profitable Dutch newsweekly, also called Elsevier, which revived a monthly shut down during the German occupation. The first English-language journal, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, followed in 1947.
Elsevier experimented early with digital delivery. A 1979 project tried sending articles electronically to libraries, a 1991 trial with nine American universities put copyrighted papers online, and ScienceDirect opened in 1997 after nearly two decades of tests. Scopus, a citation database, arrived in 2004. Buying the paper-sharing service Mendeley in 2013 drew heavy criticism from users who saw an open platform swallowed by a paywall business. The company now calls itself an information analytics business with roots in publishing.
The scale is vast. In 2022 it published over 600,000 articles in more than 2,800 journals, including The Lancet and Cell. The editors managing peer review are mostly unpaid academics volunteering alongside their day jobs, and much of the research itself is paid for with public money. In 2023 Elsevier reported pre-tax profit of £2.295 billion and an adjusted operating margin of 33.1%, which fuels accusations of rent-seeking. Stanford's faculty senate called its journals disproportionately expensive in 2004, Dutch universities threatened a boycott in 2015, and preprint servers and shadow libraries have grown partly in response.
Most of the money comes from America: in 2019, 45% of revenue was from North America, 24% from Europe and the rest from elsewhere. About 84% came from electronic use and only 16% from print.
Source: Elsevier
