Elsevier

From Eureka

Elsevier is part of a multimedia conglomerate called Reed Elsevier. In 2005, Elsevier revenues totalled €2,097 million. Elsevier has global operations involving 7,000 journal editors, 70,000 editorial board members, 200,000 reviewers, and 500,000 authors publishing 2,000 journals, 17,000 books; with 1,900 new books each year.

Elsevier is a major practitioner of journal bundling, a technique which makes it difficult for libraries to drop subscriptions to individual journals as prices rise. However, a rebellion against this is underway. In 2003, Cornell University dropped their subscription to 930 Elsevier journals. Four North Carolina universities have joined in, and the University of California has also been battling Elsevier. For other actions universities have taken, read Peter Suber's list.

With the complicity of Google Scholar, Elsevier also practices cloaking, a technique where "what you see is not what you get" when using a search engine.

Formerly, Reed Elsevier organised arms fairs as part of their group's business activity. On 1st June 2007, they announced they planned to abandon this.

Elsevier is backing PRISM, a coalition of publishers against open access. In July 2006, representatives of Elsevier and other PRISM supporters met with Eric Dezenhall to plan their public relations campaign against open access^[1]. This campaign attempts to equate traditional journals with the practice of refereeing, and equate government support for open access with censorship.

In May 2009, Elsevier drew criticism for producing a publication which superficially resembled a medical journal but which turned out to be advertising for the Merck pharmaceutical corporation:

Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles--most of which presented data favorable to Merck products--that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship.

"I've seen no shortage of creativity emanating from the marketing departments of drug companies," Peter Lurie, deputy director of the public health research group at the consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen, said, after reviewing two issues of the publication obtained by The Scientist. "But even for someone as jaded as me, this is a new wrinkle."

The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, which was published by Exerpta Medica, a division of scientific publishing juggernaut Elsevier, is not indexed in the MEDLINE database, and has no website (not even a defunct one). The Scientist obtained two issues of the journal: Volume 2, Issues 1 and 2, both dated 2003. The issues contained little in the way of advertisements apart from ads for Fosamax, a Merck drug for osteoporosis, and Vioxx.^[2]

An Elsevier spokesperson pointed out that the Australasian Journal had been discontinued some years previously, to which one surgeon replied,

So, in other words, we don't do it anymore; so it's not a big deal. Of course, Elsevier also publishes the vanity journal Medical Hypotheses, which will publish virtually any speculations authors want to publish with minimal peer review and has been a favorite of the anti-vaccine movement and other cranks. It also publishes the pseudoscientific journal Homeopathy (after all, homeopathy is quackery), a fair number of "integrative medicine" journals, and the quack journal Explore, which, as I described before, publishes Dean Radin's pseudoscientific articles on "distant healing" and food imbued with "intent."^[3]

Go to Category:Published by Elsevier to see a list of maths and physics journals published by Elsevier.

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References

↑ Jim Giles, PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access: Journal publishers lock horns with free-information movement, Nature, 24 January 2007; doi:10.1038/445347a
↑ Bob Grant, "Merck published fake journal", The Scientist. Accessed 4 May 2009.
↑ "When big pharma pays a publisher to publish a fake journal..." Respectful Insolence, 4 May 2009. Accessed 4 May 2009.

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