Elsevier

Elsevier is one of the largest and most diverse scientific and academic publishing companies in the world. Known for The Lancet, Cell Press, ScienceDirect, SciVal, Scopus, and ClinicalKey, the Amsterdam, Netherlands–based publishing company is a subsidiary of RELX Group.

Company Information

• Date founded: 1880
• Industry: Publishing
• Corporate headquarters: Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Type: Public

Overview

Elsevier is an Amsterdam, Netherlands–based publishing company focused primarily on technical, medical, and scientific platforms. The company publishes materials in both print and digital formats and began expanding into information analytics during the 2010s. The company is a subsidiary of RELX Group, a diversified London-based multinational provider of information, analytics, and legal services. RELX Group is a public company whose shares trade on the London Stock Exchange.

According to RELX Group’s 2024 annual report, Elsevier published more than 720,000 articles across 3,000 academic journals. Elsevier’s leading brands and publications include Cell Press and The Lancet. Cell Press publishes more than 50 scientific journals across branches of scholarship covering health, life, and physical sciences. The Lancet is a family of prestigious weekly, peer-reviewed medical journals established in 1823.

Much of Elsevier’s digital content is made available through its ScienceDirect portal, which is the largest platform of its kind in the publishing world. It also operates Scopus, a citation database; SciVal, a research performance database that tracks academic institutions; and ClinicalKey, a clinical reference platform used in more than eighty countries. Elsevier mainly serves academic and corporate researchers, government agencies, healthcare and scientific research institutions, and nongovernment organizations.

History

On its corporate website, Elsevier explains the origins and inspiration behind the modern company, tracing it to the work of Louis Elzevier. Elzevier was a Protestant bookmaker who settled in the Dutch city of Leiden in 1580 after fleeing persecution at the hands of Catholic authorities. He established a publishing business, which built an elevated reputation in academic circles over the course of the seventeenth century. Elzevier published works by leading intellectuals of the era, including Galileo Galilei and Rene Descartes. The original company operated by the Elzevier family went out of business in the eighteenth century, but it provided the inspirational spark for the present-day enterprise founded in 1880 by bookseller Jacobus Robbers and a group of investors.

Elsevier found early success with the Winkler Prins Illustrated Encyclopedia, which first appeared in 1884 and remained one of the company’s key products for more than a century. In 1928, it expanded into the publication of scientific and medical periodicals as the academic media landscape continued its evolution into new forms. During World War II (1939–1945), Elsevier established offices in London and New York in a bid to increase its presence in the English-speaking world. Following the war, Elsevier launched the Dutch-language news magazine Elsevier’s Weekly, which went on to become the highest-circulation Dutch periodical of the 1940s and 1950s. Elsevier reinvested the profits earned by the news magazine into its growing academic operations, which propelled the company into an extended period of prosperity. Elsevier established new headquarters in the Amsterdam suburbs in 1963, where it remains based today.

In 1970, Elsevier completed a merger with North-Holland Publishing Company, with the combined entity reaching the ranks of the world’s largest scientific publishers. Another merger followed in 1978, when Elsevier joined NDU, a Dutch newspaper publisher, as part of a strategy to invest in text-to-television broadcasting. Elsevier then merged with United Kingdom-based publisher Reed International in 1993, creating Reed Elsevier Group PLC. Reed Elsevier Group later changed its name to RELX Group, establishing headquarters in London. Elsevier continued to operate as an Amsterdam-based RELX Group subsidiary.

Elsevier introduced its flagship ScienceDirect platform in 1997, which has grown into the company’s signature subscription-based service. ScienceDirect holds the distinction of being the world’s first digital distribution platform for scientific books, journals, and research articles. Elsevier launched Scopus in 2004, SciVal in 2009, and ClinicalKey in 2012.

In 2013, Elsevier acquired Mendeley, a digital software product with desktop and mobile applications that facilitates research collaboration and information distribution. Over the remainder of the 2010s, Elsevier continued to focus on building out its portfolio of digital assets while continuing to expand its family of scientific and medical publications. In the 2020s, the company invested in integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into its products, including SciBite Chat, an AI-powered tool that helps researchers in the life sciences, and ClinicalKey AI, which combines generative AI with its clinical reference platform. Both tools were launched in 2024. As of 2025, Elsevier is led by Turkish-born Kumsal Bayazit, who took over as chief executive officer (CEO) in 2019. Bayazit became the first female CEO in Elsevier’s history.

Impact

Elsevier ranks among the largest and most diverse scientific and academic publishing companies in the world. RELX Group’s 2024 annual report noted that Elsevier’s family of publications combined to account for approximately 29 percent of all academic citations and about 17 percent of global scientific research output that year. The company also continued to attract higher volumes of article submissions and article usage. Researchers accessed the company’s articles 2.4 billion times in 2024, while the 3.5 million article submissions Elsevier received marked a significant increase over previous years. Starting in 2020, Elsevier also emerged as an important repository of information related to the COVID-19 pandemic, with its Novel Coronavirus Information Center becoming the source of more than 200 million article downloads in 2020 alone.

ScienceDirect has grown into the world’s leading digital platform for peer-reviewed medical and scientific research articles. In 2024, it attracted over 20 million unique monthly visitors, who accessed content from more than 48,000 electronic books and 5,100 peer-reviewed journals. In 2024, the Scopus citation database included 94 million individual records drawn from 30,000 journals and 7,000 different publishers, while that year SciVal tracked the research performance of more than 24,500 institutions around the world. Used in more than 80 countries, ClinicalKey is accessed by doctors, nurses, and medical students at more than 5,500 institutions globally.

While these figures illustrate Elsevier’s position of leadership in the technical, medical, and scientific publishing industry, the company also highlights its high profile among elite members of the research community. Since 2000, Elsevier has published work by 99 percent of the individuals who have won a Nobel Prize in an economic or scientific field. Each year, Elsevier honors Nobel Prize laureates by offering free access to their work.

Bibliography

"About Elsevier: This Is Elsevier." Elsevier, www.elsevier.com/about/. Accessed 5 Aug. 2025.

“Elsevier.” CrunchBase, www.crunchbase.com/organization/elsevier. Accessed 5 Aug. 2025.

"Fast Facts about Elsevier." Elsevier, assets.ctfassets.net/o78em1y1w4i4/76uVTUiLKsSQE4h4H1pZKq/e5ff8eef9694f216a5c29e2ebf80fa51/fast-facts-about-elsevier.pdf. Accessed 5 Aug. 2025.

Hellinga-Querido, Lotte, et. al. The Bookshop of the World: The Role of the Low Countries in the Book-Trade, 1473–1941. Brill Academic Publishing, 2001.

“Honoring the 2022 Nobel Laureates With Free Access to Their Research.” Elsevier, 10 Oct. 2022, www.elsevier.com/connect/honoring-the-2022-nobel-laureates. Accessed 19 July 2024.

Reller, Tom and Ian Evans. “Elsevier Welcomes a New CEO.” ScienceBusiness, 18 Feb. 2019, sciencebusiness.net/network-news/elsevier-welcomes-new-ceo. Accessed 19 July 2024.

“RELX 2024 Annual Report.” RELX Group, 2024, www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/reports/annual-reports/relx-2024-annual-report.pdf. Accessed 5 Aug. 2025.