Elsevier’s Presence on Campuses Spans More Than Journals. That Has Some Scholars Worried. - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Lyon, a librarian of scholarly communications at the University of Texas at Austin, listed scholarly-publishing tools that had been acquired by the journal publishing giant Elsevier. In 2013, the company bought Mendeley, a free reference manager. It acquired the Social Science Research Network, an e-library with more than 850,000 papers, in 2016. And it acquired the online tools Pure and Bepress — which visualize research — in 2012 and 2017, respectively.

Lyon said she started considering institutions' dependence on Elsevier when the company acquired Bepress two years ago. She was shocked, she recalled in a recent interview.

"It just got me thinking," she said. Elsevier had it all: Institutional repositories, preprints of journal articles, and analytics. "Elsevier, Elsevier, Elsevier, Elsevier, Elsevier."

Scholars are beginning to discuss the idea of Elsevier-as-monolith at conferences and in their research. Not only are librarians and researchers speaking openly about the hefty costs of bulk subscriptions to the company's premier journals, but they're also paying attention to the products that Elsevier has acquired, several of which allow its customers to store data and share their work...."