The Cost of Elsevier
I’ve just seen the annual report of RELX, the parent company of academic publishing house Elsevier. This annual report for RELX contains the accounts for Elsevier for 2022 in which I found the following headline figures:
- Revenue: €3.26 billion
- Profit: €1.2 billion
- Margin: 37.8%
A couple of points of reference are worth mentioning.
One is that the entire annual budget for the European Research Council is €2.4 billion, so Elsevier’s profits on their own represent about half this budget. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather it were spent on actual research. People talk about a windfall tax on profiteering energy companies. Why not apply the same logic in this case?
The other is that Elsevier’s profit margin (37.8%) can be compared with that of, Google (21.2%) or Apple (24.56%). It’s easy money being an academic publisher.
I cannot understand why the academic community allows this parasitic industry to flourish by continuing to throw taxpayers’ money at it. I draw your attention to the Cost of Knowledge campaign and, when it comes to publishing in Elsevier journals, acting as Editor, or doing refereeing for them, just say no.
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In the Dark 
March 9, 2023 at 9:08 am
I cannot understand why the academic community allows this parasitic industry to flourish by continuing to throw taxpayers’ money at it
It once did us a service: dissemination of research and, through peer review, quality control. The internet has made the first of these functions redundant; it was only necessary for academics to organise, as physicists and mathematicians have done with the arXiv. The second function persists because it is only peer-reviewed papers that mean anything when applying for jobs, but that can be dealt with via organising, too. Universities should forbid academics on pain of severe penalties from submitting to journals with expensive page or subscription charges, and forbid their academics to conduct peer review for such journals. Then inexpensive online-only journals that conduct peer review (whether arXiv overlay or not) would spring up and the best would quickly gain a good reputation. My admiration goes to academics who have already done that.
March 9, 2023 at 4:57 pm
I think it should be considered misconduct for an academic to pay an APC
March 9, 2023 at 10:35 am
Universities should forbid academics on pain of severe penalties from submitting to journals with expensive page or subscription charges, and forbid their academics to conduct peer review for such journals.
I think it’s even easier than that. All universities need do is say that publications in such journals don’t count towards promotion and tenure. Academics will quickly stop submitting to those journals; and as the journals rapidly lose reputation, so academics will also stop reviewing for them.
In other words, no punishment is necessary — just a realignment of incentives.
March 9, 2023 at 11:26 am
Elsevier says that it prices journals based on:
-Journal quality (as measured by journal quality Field Weighted Citation Impact Tier);
-The journal’s editorial and technical processes;
-Competitive considerations;
-Market conditions;
-Other revenue streams associated with the journal.
There is very little relation to the actual cost for that journal! (And journal quality is measured by impact factor, something we (and the university) no longer use for assessment.) So yes, it is based in being a monopolized market.
Their journals typically charge 2500 pound for a mid-quality journal.
March 9, 2023 at 12:11 pm
Page charges have another downside… when I was academically active, one of the major journals in the field was a US journal with very high page charges.. It used to publish long papers by eminent authors which actually contained very little of scientific merit. My suspicion was always that there was a cabal of senior players who used to review each others papers and, being heads of departmenst and so on, had ready access to funds for the page charges. The effect of the page charges was therefore to degrade the science.
March 9, 2023 at 1:03 pm
Indeed; and what about retired academics who are still active?
March 12, 2023 at 9:09 am
Retired Professors /Teachers often possess immense knowledge and wisdom. This needs to be constructively channelized.
Their emotions and feelings need to be understood and taken Care of.
They just expect good behavior and respect.
.
Their Experience should be tapped positively and admired from the heart
Prof. Milind Parle
March 9, 2023 at 6:05 pm
[…] A blog about the Universe, and all that surrounds it « The Cost of Elsevier […]
March 27, 2023 at 6:52 pm
I wholeheartedly agree.
June 10, 2023 at 1:53 pm
[…] that in mind it is perhaps surprising that the academic publisher Elsevier‘s profit margin is only 38%, although that is still higher than that of, for example Apple. Publishing textbooks is at least as much a license to print money as […]