Elsevier
Elsevier provides its customers with scientific and medical information and tools that improve outcomes in science and health
Elsevier is the world’s leading provider of scientific and medical information and serves scientists, health professionals and students worldwide. Elsevier provides world class information and innovative workflow tools that enable customers to make critical decisions, enhance productivity and improve outcomes.
Total revenues for the year ended 31 December 2009 were £1,985m. Elsevier is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam with principal operations in Amsterdam, Beijing, Boston, Chennai, Delhi, London, Madrid, Munich, Oxford, New York, Paris, Philadelphia, Rio de Janeiro, St. Louis, San Diego, Singapore and Tokyo. Elsevier has 6,800 employees.
Elsevier has two market facing businesses: Science & Technology serving the scientific community and Health Sciences serving the health community, both of which are supported by a global shared services organisation which provides integrated editorial systems and production services, product platforms and distribution, and other back office functions.
Science & Technology is the world’s leading global scientific information provider. It delivers a wide array of information and workflow tools that generate valuable insights for researchers in the advancement of scientific discovery and improve the productivity of research. Its customers are scientists and professionals, academic libraries, corporations and governments, who rely on Elsevier: to provide high quality content; to promote, review, publish, disseminate, and preserve research findings; and to create innovative workflow tools to improve the efficiency of their endeavour.
Science & Technology publishes over 200,000 new research articles each year through some 1,100 journals, many of which are the foremost publications in their field and a primary point of reference for new research. The vast majority of customers receive these journals through the flagship electronic research solution ScienceDirect. It is the world’s largest database of scientific and medical research, with 10 million scientific journal articles, accessed by over 11 million researchers each year.
Science & Technology also publishes over 900 new book titles annually, as well as secondary material in the form of supporting bibliographic data, indexes and abstracts, and tertiary information through review and reference works. 10,000 e-book titles are in ScienceDirect, with over 400 e-books added each year.
Science & Technology’s other flagship electronic solutions include Scopus and the recently launched Reaxys and SciVal Spotlight services. Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of research literature in the world, with the abstracts and bibliographic information of more than 40 million scientific research articles from 17,000 peer reviewed journals and over 5,000 publishers. Scopus also has data on more than 23 million patents. Reaxys is a new solution for synthetic chemists, based on Elsevier’s prestigious CrossFire Database suite, which integrates chemical reaction and compound data searching with synthesis planning. The SciVal suite of research tools enables individual researchers and institutional leadership to determine and evaluate their research strategies more effectively.
Health Sciences is the world’s leading medical publisher. It serves health professionals, including medical researchers, doctors, nurses, allied health professionals and students, as well as hospitals, research institutions, managed healthcare organisations, pharmaceutical companies and insurers. Through its medical journals, books, major reference works, databases and online information solutions, Health Sciences provides critical information and analysis on which its customers rely to base their decisions, to improve medical outcomes and enhance the efficiency of healthcare.
Health Sciences publishes over 700 journals, including on behalf of learned societies, and, in 2009, over 1,700 new book titles and clinical reference works both in print and through ScienceDirect and other electronic platforms such as MDConsult, which is a leading online clinical information service with more than 2,200 institutional customers and over 12 million page views per month. Flagship titles include market leading medical journals such as The Lancet, and major medical reference works such as Gray’s Anatomy, Nelson’s Pediatrics and Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy. In addition to its local language publishing in countries across the world, Health Sciences leverages its strong brands and international content and solutions into new markets through local language versioning. The business also provides marketing services to the pharmaceutical industry through advertising and sponsored communications to the specialist communities it serves.
Heath Sciences is a leader in medical education and training resources, particularly in the nursing and allied health professions. From core textbooks to virtual clinical patient care, Heath Sciences supports students, teaching faculties and healthcare organisations in education and practice. A strong focus is on the further development of innovative electronic resources: the Evolve portal provides a rich resource to support faculty and students and now has 1.8 million registered users; Health Education Systems Inc provides online review and testing tools for nursing and allied health staff; the recently launched Pageburst digital content delivery platform delivers book content online with powerful search, multimedia, and collaboration functions.
A fast growing area of the business is clinical decision support, providing online information and analytics to deliver patient-specific solutions at the point of care to improve patient outcomes. Gold Standard provides critical information on drug interactions to assist effective treatment; CPM Resource Center provides a data driven framework to support nurses in undertaking procedures; Nursing Consult provides nursing care guidelines in trauma and disease management; MEDai uses patient data and analytics to help identify areas for improvement in clinical practice within hospitals and lower costs for the payers of healthcare through preventative interventions.
Market Opportunities
Growth in the scientific information market is driven by increases in R&D spend reflected in the growing number of researchers worldwide and research output, and the demand for improved research efficiency.
In healthcare, market growth is supported by favourable demographic trends, with ageing populations requiring more healthcare and rising prosperity in developing economies increasing expectations of better healthcare provision. The healthcare professions are growing and information intensity is increasing as payers and providers of healthcare look to improve medical outcomes and cost efficiency.
Strategic Priorities
Elsevier’s strategic goal is to make valued contributions to the communities it serves by providing actionable data through information and tools that advance scientific discovery and improve medical outcomes. To achieve this, Elsevier is focused on: building world class content; developing workflow tools that link, analyse and illuminate content and data to help customers to make and execute critical decisions and improve their productivity; enhancing customer service and engagement to better fulfil the needs of the scientific and health communities; expanding penetration of high growth markets; and improving organisational efficiency.
In Science & Technology, the priorities are to continue to enhance the quality of journal and book content and expand data sets whilst adding greater functionality and utility to ScienceDirect and other database services. New workflow tools are being introduced to assist researcher productivity together with new performance and planning tools to improve research efficiency and economic outcomes.
In Health Sciences, priorities are similar, particularly with regard to medical research. Additionally, Elsevier is building out clinical decision support services to meet the demand for tools to help deliver better medical outcomes and lower costs for payers, physicians and hospitals. Elsevier is also focused on increasing its penetration in emerging markets through expansion of local publishing and versioning of content and digital services.
Distribution Channels and Competition
Elsevier’s science journals are generally sold to libraries on a paid subscription basis. Medical and healthcare journals are generally sold to libraries on a paid subscription basis or sold to individual practitioners and medical society members. Electronic products, such as ScienceDirect, are generally sold directly to institutional libraries, hospitals, corporations and end users through a dedicated sales force that has offices around the world. Subscription agents facilitate the administrative process for print journals. Books are sold through traditional and online book stores, wholesalers and, particularly in medical and healthcare markets, directly to end users.
Competition within the science and medical publishing fields is generally on a title by title and product by product basis. Competing journals, books and databases are typically published by learned societies and other professional publishers.
