Mark Seeley
Senior Vice President/ General Counsel
Areas of expertise: Publishing ethics, copyright, intellectual property, access and distribution licensing
A frequent speaker on copyright and public policy issues at publishing and scientific conferences, Mark heads up Elsevier‘s global legal department of lawyers which addresses corporate organization and compliance, mergers, acquisitions, and copyright policy and enforcement. Mark is the chair of the Copyright Committee of the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) and a member of the Copyright Committee of the Association of American Publishers. The STM association looks to create a platform for exchanging ideas and information and to represent the interests of the STM publishing community in the fields of copyright, technology developments, and end user/library relations.
Mark joined Elsevier in 1995 as General Counsel after working six years in the Legal Department of Reed Elsevier USA. He was closely involved in the rollout of the ScienceDirect licensing practices from 1996 to 1998, he also played a pivotal role in the acquisition of Harcourt in 2001, including UK and US competition clearance and integration and the recent divestitures of MDL and Endeavor.
More recently Mark has coordinated industry-wide negotiations and enforcement actions concerning the Subito university library document delivery system (based in Germany), and similar copyright enforcement efforts in Europe and the US. Finally, Mark also helped coordinate the 2004 litigation brought against the US government (OFAC) concerning authors from "banned" countries such as Iran and Cuba.
