Elsevier

Elsevier, the world's largest publisher of medical and scientific literature, forms part of the Reed Elsevier group. Based in Amsterdam, the company has substantial operations in the UK, USA and elsewhere.

Origins

Elsevier took its name (in modernised form) from the historic Dutch publishing house of the same name (see House of Elzevir). The Elzevir family had operated as booksellers and publishers in the Netherlands. Its founder, Lodewijk Elzevir, (1542–1617) lived in Leiden and established the business in 1580.

As publishers of new work by Descartes, Galileo, and Grotius, they account for part of the reason for Bertrand Russell's comment that it "is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Holland in the seventeenth century, as the one country where there was freedom of speculation".

Modern company

The modern company was founded in 1880. Leading products include journals such as The Lancet, Cell and Tetrahedron Letters, books such Gray's Anatomy and the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals. Others include the Trends series, and the Current Opinion series.

In recent years the subscription rates charged by the company for its journals have been criticised; some very large journals (those with more than 5000 articles) charge subscription prices as high as $14,000, far above average. The company has been criticised not just by advocates of a switch to the so-called open-access publication model, but also by universities whose library budgets make it difficult for them to afford current journal prices. At the end of 2003, the entire editorial board of the prestigious Journal of Algorithms resigned to start Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower priced publisher.^*^*

Origins

Modern company

External links

See also

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Origins

Modern company

External links

See also