Elsevier

What does Elsevier own?

Elsevier operates thousands of journals including The Lancet and Cell, plus platforms such as ScienceDirect, Scopus, SciVal, and ClinicalKey. Its health education portfolio includes Osmosis, Complete Anatomy, Shadow Health, Sherpath, and the HESI assessment program.

Is Elsevier publicly traded?

No. Elsevier is a wholly owned subsidiary of RELX plc, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange, Euronext Amsterdam, and the New York Stock Exchange. There is no separate Elsevier stock.

Who founded Elsevier?

The company was founded in 1880 in Rotterdam by a group of Dutch publishers including Jacobus George Robbers, who named it after the historic Elzevir family of printers. The modern firm has no connection to the original Elzevir business beyond the name.

Where is Elsevier headquartered?

Elsevier is headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands, at Radarweg 29. Its largest other sites are in the United States, the United Kingdom, and across Europe and Asia.

How many brands does Elsevier own?

Elsevier publishes more than 2,800 journals and operates a handful of major platform brands, most prominently ScienceDirect, Scopus, and ClinicalKey, plus education properties such as Osmosis and Complete Anatomy.

Who owns Elsevier?

Elsevier is owned by RELX plc, the British information analytics company formed by the 1993 merger of Reed International and Elsevier. RELX is publicly traded and widely held by institutional investors.

What is Elsevier's revenue?

The Elsevier business, reported as RELX's Scientific, Technical and Medical segment, generated 2.714 billion pounds in revenue and 1.035 billion pounds in adjusted operating profit for fiscal year 2025.

The company was founded in 1880 in Rotterdam as Uitgeversmaatschappij Elsevier by a group of Dutch publishers led by Jacobus George Robbers. They named the firm after the Elzevir family, Dutch printers active from the 16th to 18th centuries whose name carried prestige in publishing. The early business produced Dutch literature, classics, and encyclopedias.

During the 20th century Elsevier shifted toward scientific and technical publishing, building an international journal program after the Second World War. It expanded into English-language scientific journals in the 1960s and 1970s, opened offices in New York and London, and acquired medical publisher Excerpta Medica. In 1979 the firm added Elsevier Scientific Publishing to its structure, and through the 1980s it bought assets including the British publisher Pergamon Press in 1991, which brought in the journal portfolio built by Robert Maxwell.

In 1993 Elsevier NV merged with Reed International to form Reed Elsevier, a jointly owned Anglo-Dutch group. The combined company accelerated the move from print to electronic products, launching ScienceDirect in 1997 as one of the first large web platforms for full-text journals and introducing Scopus in 2004 as a competitor to Web of Science.

The parent simplified its name to RELX in 2015 and unified under a single UK-listed share class in 2018. Kumsal Bayazit became Elsevier chief executive in February 2019. Under her leadership the company has expanded beyond publishing into research analytics and health education, acquiring the medical video platform Osmosis in November 2021, the 3D anatomy business 3D4Medical in 2019, and analytics firm Interfolio in 2022. In recent years it has launched AI-assisted products including Scopus AI and ClinicalKey AI.

Elsevier's sustainability posture is reported through RELX group disclosures, which carry an MSCI AAA ESG rating and science-based emissions targets. Operationally, its footprint is light because most revenue is digital, and the company has promoted responsible AI principles and research-integrity tooling, including the Scopus-based tools it sells to detect questionable publishing practices.

The company's central ethical debate is the structure of academic publishing itself. Critics argue that publicly funded research sits behind subscription paywalls and that article processing charges shift rather than solve the problem. Elsevier counters that its platforms add peer review, integrity screening, and discovery infrastructure, and it has signed read-and-publish agreements across Europe and North America to accommodate open-access mandates.

Pricing disputes with university systems have produced the most visible controversies. The University of California system cancelled its Elsevier subscription in 2019 in a fight over open-access terms before reaching a new agreement in 2021. German and Swedish consortia went through similar standoffs that ended in read-and-publish contracts.

The company has also faced periodic scrutiny over editorial independence and over the sale of products historically linked to defense and surveillance-adjacent customers through RELX's risk businesses. In 2019 and the early 2020s, academic groups petitioned RELX and Elsevier over data practices and the use of Scopus metrics in research assessment. Elsevier says its editorial processes are independent and that its tools comply with GDPR and other data rules.