With over 2,000 journals publishing some 290,000 articles per year, many significant scientific, technical and medical breakthroughs have appeared in Elsevier journals. Elsevier also facilitates advances in science by nurturing new sources of scientific knowledge and bringing capital and resources, and bearing the associated financial risks, in starting new journals.

As a publisher Elsevier performs essential functions in proactively managing manuscript submissions, the peer review process, editing and preparing manuscripts, as well as managing the production of print and electronic versions of journal articles. Elsevier then publishes and disseminates, as well as archives and promotes the scientific papers it publishes.

	Soliciting and managing submissions: > 520,000 plus article submissions per year.
	Managing peer review: 200,000 referees with over 1 million referee reports per year; 40%-90% of articles are rejected.
	Editing and preparing manuscripts: working with 7,000 editors to prepare accepted manuscripts; 70,000 editorial board members and 6.5 million author/publisher communications per year.
	Publishing and disseminating: 11 million researchers; 4,500 plus institutions and 180 plus countries. Generating over 250 million plus downloads per year and 2.5 million print pages per year.
	Archiving and promoting: more than 8 million articles now available on ScienceDirect and are preserved in perpetuity for scientists, scholars and clinicians.

Elsevier, as a commercial publisher, is independent from governments, lobby groups and other stakeholders in the discourse of science. This ensures editorial independence and publisher neutrality and continues to build upon a long tradition of publishing, as set by the house of Elzevier's decision to publish "the discourses of mathematical demonstrations relating to two new sciences" in 1638.

Elsevier's mission is to be the best home for authors, editors and reviewers. We systematically carry out surveys within these groups to measure our performance in all areas of the publishing process and also to benchmark ourselves against our competitors. Feedback from these surveys is taken note of at the highest levels and is taken into account when determining how Elsevier can improve its performance at a structural level.

The Author Feedback Programme is a continuous research programme monitoring the performance of Elsevier's primary journals. The programme allows us to closely monitor author opinion and thus our own performance. By doing this and setting an appropriate course of actions we can ensure that the quality of the service Elsevier journals provide continue to meet the needs of the scientific community.

The programme monitors the opinions of corresponding authors who have recently published in an Elsevier journal by inviting authors to answer a number of questions concerning their publishing experience, evaluating aspects such as reputation, production speed, publishing services, the editorial board and impact factor. Authors are also invited to rate another title in which they have recently published (in many cases this will be a competitor title).

Since August 1999, when the Author Feedback Programme commenced, 157,329 questionnaires have been mailed and 36,288 questionnaires returned, by authors who have published in Elsevier physics and astronomy journals.

Elsevier is committed to the highest standards of editorial review and publishes articles that have been selected via the peer-review system. Our peer reviewed publications are written and edited by internationally respected researchers, scientists and practitioners with strong technical and scholarship credentials.

We partner with more than 7,000 academic editors to publish our journals and work with over 200,000 referees per year across our journal publishing programmes. In 2001 Elsevier pioneered the first e-submission tools and we continue to develop our online article submission system as part of our ongoing effort to improve the efficiency and accuracy of our editorial procedures and the timeliness of manuscript publication.

The selection process is competitive and rigorous. Over 80% of Nobel Laureates have published with Elsevier over the last 50 years and virtually all of the most cited scientists of the last decade have published in Elsevier journals.

As a publisher we also bear the responsibility and costs of monitoring, investigating and resolving issues of plagiarism. Along with 7 other publishers, Elsevier is currently involved in the new strategic CrossRef initiative, called ‘CrossCheck’. A pilot which is investigating the feasibility of a cross-publisher plagiarism detection (PD) service.

Elsevier Editorial Services (EES) reduces publication times and decreases workload per article thus reducing Editor handling time by 25%. The average time between article submission and acceptance for publication has dropped from 26 to 17 weeks meaning that on average author waiting time has been reduced by 9 weeks per article.

Once a manuscript has been accepted it will appear on ScienceDirect within 5 days with a citable DOI.

STM publishing involves and respects the equal and legitimate desire of authors from all parts of the world to publish their findings. Like most other subscription based STM publishers, Elsevier ensures that researchers can submit their work for free, including authors from under-funded fields or developing countries. The fact that there are no financial deterrents or incentives in this system ensures its independence and integrity.