Elsevier is a Dutch publishing and analytics company specialized in scientific, medical and technical contents. It belongs to RELX Group.
Major products
Elsevier provides various services to support researchers. Some of them are similar to Google Scholar by Google.
ScienceDirect
ScienceDirect is a website which gives subscription-based access to a large database of scientific and medical research. It stores many papers and academic journals as PDF.
Scopus
Scopus is Elsevier’s abstract and citation database launched in 2004. It gives four types of quality measure for each title; those are h-Index, CiteScore, SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) and SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper).
International relationships
Elsevier is not a non-profit organization. Therefore, some of their products are not cheap. Due to this difficulty, some universities have terminated their contract with Elsevier.
France
The French Couperin consortium agreed in 2019 to a 4-year contract with Elsevier. This agreement was made despite criticism from the scientific community.
Germany
Almost no academic institution in Germany is subscribed to Elsevier.
Italy
CRUI (an association of universities in Italy) sealed a 5-year-long deal for 2018–2022. This decision was made despite protests from the scientific community.
Taiwan
In 2016, CONCERT (an association of universities in Taiwan) announced it would not renew its contract with Elsevier.
Ukraine
In June 2020, the government of Ukraine cancelled subscriptions for all state universities because two parties did not negotiate on conditions.
Legal actions
Lobbying efforts against open access
Elsevier have been known to be involved in lobbying against open access. These have included the likes of: Federal Research Public Access Act Research Works Act Horizon 2020 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
Lawsuits
In 2015, Elsevier filed a lawsuit against the sites Sci-Hub and Library Genesis. They were making copyright-protected articles available for free. Elsevier also claimed illegal access to institutional accounts.