Restrictive access practices
Lobbying efforts against open access
Elsevier have been known to be involved in lobbying against open access.[127] These have included:
Sale of open-access articles
In 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017,[151] Elsevier was found to be selling some articles that should have been open access, but had been put behind a paywall.[152] A related case occurred in 2015, when Elsevier charged for downloading an open-access article from a journal published by John Wiley & Sons. However, whether Elsevier was in violation of the license under which the article was made available on their website was not clear.[153]
Action against academics posting their own articles online
In 2013, Digimarc, a company representing Elsevier, told the University of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta to remove articles published by faculty authors on university web pages; although such self-archiving of academic articles may be legal under the fair dealing provisions in Canadian copyright law,[154] the university complied. Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the University of California, Irvine also received takedown notices for self-archived academic articles, a first for Harvard, according to Peter Suber.[155][156][157]
Months after its acquisition of Academia.edu rival Mendeley, Elsevier sent thousands of takedown notices to Academia.edu, a practice which has since ceased after widespread complaints by academics, according to Academia.edu founder and chief executive Richard Price.
Lawsuits against paper-sharing sites
In 2015, Elsevier filed a lawsuit against the sites Sci-Hub and LibGen, which make copyright-protected articles available for free. Elsevier also claimed illegal access to institutional accounts.[160]
After a case was brought forward in 2017 by the Coalition for Responsible Sharing, a group of publishers which includes Elsevier and the American Chemical Society, the chamber of the Munich Regional Court ruled that the research networking site ResearchGate has to take down articles uploaded without consent from their original publishers, including Elsevier.[161]
Resignation of editorial boards
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 1999, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Logic Programming resigned after 16 months of unsuccessful negotiations with Elsevier about the price of library subscriptions.[162] The personnel created a new journal, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, with Cambridge University Press in Cambridge, England at a much lower price,[162] while Elsevier continued publication with a new editorial board and a slightly different name (the Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming).
- In 2002, dissatisfaction at Elsevier's pricing policies caused the European Economic Association to terminate an agreement with Elsevier designating Elsevier's European Economic Review as the official journal of the association. The EEA launched a new journal, the Journal of the European Economic Association.[163]
"The Cost of Knowledge" boycott
In 2003, various university librarians began coordinating with each other to complain about Elsevier's "big deal" journal bundling packages, in which 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 that he would boycott Elsevier, noting that others in 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.[185][186][187]
Afterwards 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".
Plan S open-access initiative
About a Europe-based initiative called Plan S aimed at requiring researchers to publish in open-access journals,[191] a spokesman for Elsevier said "If you think that information should be free of charge, go to Wikipedia".[192] 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.[193]
Lobbying efforts against open access
Elsevier have been known to be involved in lobbying against open access.[127] These have included:
Sale of open-access articles
In 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017,[151] Elsevier was found to be selling some articles that should have been open access, but had been put behind a paywall.[152] A related case occurred in 2015, when Elsevier charged for downloading an open-access article from a journal published by John Wiley & Sons. However, whether Elsevier was in violation of the license under which the article was made available on their website was not clear.[153]
Action against academics posting their own articles online
In 2013, Digimarc, a company representing Elsevier, told the University of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta to remove articles published by faculty authors on university web pages; although such self-archiving of academic articles may be legal under the fair dealing provisions in Canadian copyright law,[154] the university complied. Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the University of California, Irvine also received takedown notices for self-archived academic articles, a first for Harvard, according to Peter Suber.[155][156][157]
Months after its acquisition of Academia.edu rival Mendeley, Elsevier sent thousands of takedown notices to Academia.edu, a practice which has since ceased after widespread complaints by academics, according to Academia.edu founder and chief executive Richard Price.
Lawsuits against paper-sharing sites
In 2015, Elsevier filed a lawsuit against the sites Sci-Hub and LibGen, which make copyright-protected articles available for free. Elsevier also claimed illegal access to institutional accounts.[160]
After a case was brought forward in 2017 by the Coalition for Responsible Sharing, a group of publishers which includes Elsevier and the American Chemical Society, the chamber of the Munich Regional Court ruled that the research networking site ResearchGate has to take down articles uploaded without consent from their original publishers, including Elsevier.[161]
Resignation of editorial boards
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 1999, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Logic Programming resigned after 16 months of unsuccessful negotiations with Elsevier about the price of library subscriptions.[162] The personnel created a new journal, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, with Cambridge University Press in Cambridge, England at a much lower price,[162] while Elsevier continued publication with a new editorial board and a slightly different name (the Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming).
- In 2002, dissatisfaction at Elsevier's pricing policies caused the European Economic Association to terminate an agreement with Elsevier designating Elsevier's European Economic Review as the official journal of the association. The EEA launched a new journal, the Journal of the European Economic Association.[163]
"The Cost of Knowledge" boycott
In 2003, various university librarians began coordinating with each other to complain about Elsevier's "big deal" journal bundling packages, in which 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 that he would boycott Elsevier, noting that others in 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.[185][186][187]
Afterwards 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".
Plan S open-access initiative
About a Europe-based initiative called Plan S aimed at requiring researchers to publish in open-access journals,[191] a spokesman for Elsevier said "If you think that information should be free of charge, go to Wikipedia".[192] 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.[193]
Business practices and editorial standards
"Who's Afraid of Peer Review"
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?"[194] 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.[195] Instead, Drug Invention Today 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.[196]
Fake journals
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
"Who's Afraid of Peer Review"
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?"[194] 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.[195] Instead, Drug Invention Today 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.[196]
Fake journals
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 a peer-reviewed academic journal but in fact contained only articles favourable to Merck drugs.[197][198][199][200] Merck described the journal as a "complimentary publication", denied claims that articles within it were ghost written by Merck, and said that the articles were all reprinted from peer-reviewed medical journals.[201] 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 the proper disclosures". The statement acknowledged that it "was an unacceptable practice".
Chaos, Solitons & Fractals
There was speculation[206] 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.[207] The controversy was covered extensively in blogs.[208][209] The publisher announced in January 2009 that El Naschie had retired as editor-in-chief.[210] As of November 2011 the co-Editors-in-Chief of the journal were Maurice Courbage and Paolo Grigolini.[211] 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.
Plagiarism
Albanian politician Taulant Muka claimed that Elsevier journal Procedia had plagiarized in the abstract of one of its articles. It is unclear whether or not Muka had access to the entirety of the article.[215]
Scientific racism
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.[216] The journal Intelligence has been criticized for having "occasionally included papers with pseudoscientific findings about intelligence differences between races".[217] It 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.[218]
In response to a 2019 open letter, efforts by Retraction Watch and a petition, on 17 June 2020 Elsevier announced it was retracting an article that J. Philippe Rushton and Donald Templer published in 2012 in the Elsevier journal Personality and Individual Differences.[219]
Manipulation of bibliometrics
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 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.[221] However, there's evidence suggesting that reliability of published research works in several fields may decrease with increasing journal rank.[222]
Nine Elsevier journals, which exhibited unusual levels of self-citation, had their journal impact factor of 2019 suspended from Journal Citation Reports in 2020, a sanction that hit 34 journals in total.[223]
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. One of their journals, Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis, was involved in the manipulation of the peer review report.[224]
Climate change
Elsevier publishes research by climate change researchers in many of its journals, but also publishes books for the fossil fuel industry about expanding production, as well as other products such as a geomapping tool to help find oil and gas reserves.[225] Climate scientists are concerned that this conflict of interest could undermine the credibility of climate science because they believe that fossil fuel extraction and climate action are incompatible.[226][227]
Involvement in international arms trade
Elsevier organized international arms fairs until 2007, when they announced they would no longer do so, after various protests and calls to boycott their journals.[228]
