Research Practices and Tools: The world according to Elsevier

"Elsevier is considered by some academics as the worst predatory publisher, and is a favourite target for boycotts. In particular, the negotiations for subscriptions to bundles of journals, which were the subject of my previous post, are particularly difficult in the case of Elsevier, leading to much frustration for academic institutions. But what sets Elsevier apart from other academic publishers? Let me give some tentative answers, based on observations on Elsevier's behaviour. I will first give the data, and then try to explain them in terms of a coherent strategy. Elsevier considers open access to scientific publications as a threat, and fights against it. This is explicitly said (in milder terms) in their 2011 financial review. In particular, Elsevier fights against Green open access while pretending to allow it, by trying to make it as impractical as possible. Elsevier also fights against authors sharing their own articles on academic social networks. Elsevier diversifies to all aspects of scientific information -- not only publications. In particular, they own the bibliographic database Scopus, and recently acquired the social network cum article sharing platform Mendeley. Elsevier is aggressively marketing Scopus at very low prices, with the apparent aim of replacing Web of Science as the leading bibliographic database.  Elsevier insists on the perpetual increase of subscription prices for any given institution, and justifies this by concurrently increasing the quality and quantity of services, whether the subscribers want it or not.  The intransigeance of Elsevier on subscription prices forces some institutions to cancel subscriptions to smaller publishers, including Wiley.  Elsevier pays the academic editors of some of its journals. It may be that Elsevier is an academic publisher like any other, which can afford to be meaner and greedier than the rest because it is bigger. It may even be, as some claim, that Elsevier is compromising its long-term survival by maximizing short-term profit -- a theory which would survive Hanlon's razor. Here, I will entertain the opposite hypothesis: that Elsevier has a rational long-term strategy for becoming the dominant company in the field of research-related information ..."