Is Elsevier bad for scientific publishing

Is Elsevier Bad for Scientific Publishing?

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Elsevier is one of the most powerful names in academic publishing. Founded in 1880, it is now a major part of the RELX Group and publishes over 2,800 journals. It also hosts millions of scientific articles, books, and research datasets on platforms like ScienceDirect and Scopus.

There’s no denying that Elsevier has contributed to the dissemination of scholarly knowledge on an industrial scale. You probably can’t walk through a university library—or read a literature review—without bumping into something that has Elsevier’s fingerprints all over it. But with great dominance comes great scrutiny.

In recent years, Elsevier has increasingly found itself in the crosshairs of academics, librarians, open access advocates, and even governments. Why? Some of its practices, although perfectly legal and undeniably profitable, raise fundamental questions about ethics, equity, and the future of scholarly publishing.

This article isn’t a hit piece. It’s not an ad either. It’s a clear-eyed look at the many-sided beast that is Elsevier: its monumental achievements, yes, but also the long tail of criticisms that won’t go away. So, is Elsevier bad for scientific publishing? That depends on how comfortable you are with oligopolies, subscription paywalls, and vertical integrations that make Wall Street blush.

The Oligopoly Problem

Let’s not beat around the bush: Elsevier is part of an academic publishing oligopoly. Alongside Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis, Elsevier controls the majority of high-impact scientific journals worldwide. This concentration of publishing power isn’t just a mild inconvenience; it fundamentally shapes the economics, accessibility, and ethos of scientific publishing.

When a handful of publishers dominate the market, competition falters. Journal subscription prices rise. Libraries pay millions for access bundles (often referred to as “big deals”) that include many journals their researchers rarely use. Worse still, universities often find themselves locked into annual negotiations with these publishing giants, holding their breath to avoid a knowledge blackout for their students and faculty.

The oligopoly also creates a form of cultural gatekeeping. These companies have disproportionate influence over which voices get amplified in academia. Editorial board selections, scope decisions, and citation metrics are often subtly influenced by corporate interests. It becomes less about the open pursuit of knowledge and more about portfolio management and brand-building.

And then there’s the question of innovation. When one company dominates a field, there’s little incentive to change. The peer review process remains stubbornly slow. Submission platforms feel archaic. Author rights are often sacrificed. Monopolistic control over scholarly infrastructure means that any attempts at systemic reform must first go through a corporate gatekeeper.

Access, Cost, and the Paywall Fortress

It costs money to publish. Fine. But how much, and who pays? In Elsevier’s case, the answer often circles back to a peculiar, one-way street of revenue collection. Authors write and peer review articles, usually unpaid. Then, universities and libraries pay hefty subscription fees to access those same articles. This paywalled model has been criticized as deeply exploitative and structurally inequitable.

Take a university in a developing country. That institution might contribute to global knowledge through its scholars, yet it often can’t afford to read the very research its faculty helped produce. Elsevier’s pricing strategies have led to frequent cancellations of subscriptions. In 2019, the University of California system canceled its Elsevier subscription due to cost and open-access disagreements, a decision that garnered worldwide headlines.

Elsevier’s open access offerings (like those under its “Open Access” and “Elsevier Open” models) have expanded, but critics argue they merely shift the financial burden from libraries to authors through article processing charges (APCs). These APCs can be upwards of $3,000 per article, an insurmountable barrier for many early-career researchers and scholars outside the Global North. Accessibility improves, sure, but at a cost that raises eyebrows and equity concerns.

The irony is painful: the very institutions producing knowledge must buy it back. Paywalls don’t just hinder casual readers; they block interdisciplinary collaborations, slow medical innovations, and widen the global divide in scientific participation. A well-funded researcher at MIT enjoys a wealth of information. A scientist in Nairobi, not so much.

A Curious Case of Vertical Integration

Elsevier doesn’t just publish journals. It also owns platforms such as Scopus, Mendeley, SSRN, and ScienceDirect. These are tools that researchers use to search, manage, cite, and disseminate their work. This ownership presents an awkward entanglement of roles. When the same company owns both the content and the discovery tools, questions arise: Are these tools recommending content impartially? Are citation metrics being gamed? Is user data being harvested and monetized?

Scopus, Elsevier’s bibliographic database, is a case in point. It’s widely used for academic evaluation, hiring, and promotion decisions. If Elsevier both curates the database and publishes many of the journals it indexes, can it remain an unbiased referee? Critics have warned that vertical integration allows Elsevier to become judge, jury, and profit-maker, blurring the lines between platform and publisher, content and conduit.

There’s also the issue of surveillance capitalism. As researchers use Elsevier’s platforms, their behaviors—such as searches, reading habits, and collaboration patterns—can be tracked. Who controls that data? Who benefits from it? And most importantly, did the researchers consent in any meaningful way?

Furthermore, the entanglement of services means institutions may feel coerced into Elsevier’s ecosystem. Mendeley becomes your reference manager. Scopus your impact tracker. SSRN is your preprint server. Each tool is useful, sure. However, each also tightens Elsevier’s grip on the scholarly workflow.

The Acquisition Machine

Elsevier has made a series of strategic acquisitions over the years, acquiring analytics platforms, databases, and startups in adjacent industries. The official narrative is always the same: synergy, efficiency, better services. However, critics often view these acquisitions as part of a broader strategy to monopolize not only the content of science but also its infrastructure.

In 2018, Elsevier bought bepress, a platform used by university libraries to host institutional repositories. That raised alarms in the open access community: Was Elsevier co-opting the tools designed to disrupt its own dominance? Similar concerns surfaced when Elsevier acquired Aries Systems (the maker of Editorial Manager), giving it greater control over the peer review workflow across thousands of journals, including those not published by Elsevier.

This expansion is not benign. As Elsevier buys its way into every part of the research lifecycle—from manuscript submission to citations and impact analytics—its tentacles grow longer. It becomes increasingly difficult for universities to operate without paying Elsevier in multiple ways. At some point, the concern becomes not just financial, but existential.

Let’s not forget the recent purchase of Interfolio, a faculty information system used for hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. If that doesn’t scream consolidation, what does? These moves enable Elsevier to insert itself more deeply into the bureaucratic machinery of higher education, all while reinforcing its data empire.

Elsevier vs. the Academic Community

The friction between Elsevier and the academic community is well-documented. In 2012, over 17,000 researchers signed the Cost of Knowledge boycott, vowing not to publish or peer-review for Elsevier journals. The protest was driven by frustration over high prices, restrictive access, and what many perceived as Elsevier’s lobbying against open access mandates.

Despite such protests, Elsevier has continued to thrive, reporting billions in annual revenues. That resilience suggests that boycotts and criticism, while emotionally satisfying, rarely make a dent without institutional backing. And yet, some universities and national consortia have held their ground. Germany, Sweden, and Hungary, among others, have seen subscription stand-offs and walkouts over pricing and open access terms.

Elsevier has responded with incremental reforms, including open access pilot deals and publishing agreements tied to transformative access. But many argue these deals simply repackage the same structural inequalities. They often involve enormous fees and still exclude many researchers from participation. The fight, in short, is far from over.

It’s worth noting how Elsevier defends itself: it invests heavily in infrastructure, ensures rigorous peer review, and supports thousands of editors and reviewers. These are not minor contributions. Still, the underlying tension remains: should scholarly knowledge be controlled by publicly-funded institutions or profit-driven companies?

Metrics, Power, and Influence

Science today runs on metrics: impact factors, h-indexes, citation counts. Elsevier is deeply embedded in this metrics ecosystem. Not only does it own Scopus, it also licenses and promotes tools like PlumX Metrics and SciVal, products that help institutions benchmark performance.

But here’s the catch: when one company controls the means of ranking and the journals being ranked, the temptation to engineer favorable outcomes is hard to ignore. Conflicts of interest don’t need to be proven to be problematic; their mere existence should raise red flags. Academic careers hang in the balance of these numbers. Should any single corporation be allowed to set the rules of that game?

Elsevier’s influence also extends into policy. It lobbies governments, funds research into publishing norms, and helps shape global data infrastructure. Its power is cultural, financial, and epistemic—a trifecta that few competitors can match. Critics worry that Elsevier is no longer just a publisher. It’s an empire.

And let’s not overlook how this empire subtly redefines academic values. The emphasis on citations over substance, journal prestige over accessibility, and metrics over meaningful impact shapes how scholars write, publish, and evaluate their work. That influence isn’t just powerful. It’s transformative.

Conclusion

Elsevier has done more than any single publisher to scale up the global dissemination of scientific knowledge. Its infrastructure is efficient, its journals are respected, and its reach is immense. But with this power comes responsibility. And skepticism. Many of Elsevier’s business practices reflect a corporate logic that doesn’t always align with the values of openness, collaboration, and equity that many researchers hold dear.

Is Elsevier bad for scientific publishing? It depends on which side of the paywall you sit. If you’re an institutional librarian negotiating your fifth year of six-figure subscription fees, you might say yes. If you’re a scientist whose work is cited and preserved on ScienceDirect, it may not be. But the most important question isn’t about Elsevier alone. It’s about the system that allows one company to dominate knowledge like this in the first place.

As long as scientific prestige and profit are tightly intertwined, Elsevier will continue to be both essential and controversial. Perhaps the real challenge lies not in breaking up the oligopoly but in envisioning a scholarly ecosystem that prioritizes transparency over opacity, community over consolidation, and access over exclusion.

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