With over 1,800 journals publishing some 250,000 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 is committed to the highest standards of editorial review and publishes articles that have been selected via the peer-review system. Peer-reviewed journals can be relied upon because they aggregate, filter and validate author submissions independent of any outside influence or interested third party.

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. 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 (97%) 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. -  www.crossref.org 

Significant rights are granted to or retained by Elsevier journal authors with respect to their use of their own work. Without charge or requesting permission from Elsevier journal authors have the right to:

	Make copies (print or electronic) of the article for their own personal use, including for their own classroom teaching use;
	Make copies and distribute such copies (including through e-mail) of the article to known research colleagues, for the personal use by such colleagues (but not for commercial purposes);
	Post a pre-print version of the article on Internet web sites including electronic pre-print servers, and to retain indefinitely such version on such servers or sites (with some exceptions such as The Lancet and Cell Press);
	Post a revised personal version of the final text of the article (to reflect changes made in the peer review and editing process) on their personal or institutional web site or server, with a link (through the DOI) to the article as published, provided that such postings are not used for commercial purposes;
	Present the article at a meeting or conference and to distribute copies of the article to the delegates attending such meeting;
	For their employer, if the article is a ‘work for hire', made within the scope of employment, the employer may use all or part of the information in the article for other intra-company use (e.g. training);
	Retain patent and trademark rights and rights to any process or procedure described in the article;
	Include the article in full or in part in a thesis or dissertation (provided that this is not to be published commercially);
	Use the article or any part thereof in a printed compilation of their own works, such as collected writings or lecture notes (subsequent to publication of the article in the journal); and
	Prepare other derivative works, to extend the article into book-length form, or to otherwise re-use portions or excerpts in other works, with full acknowledgement of its original publication in the journal.

Elsevier is neutral in the decision whether or not to publish a scientist' work.  External editors and editorial boards make such decisions based upon the quality of the underlying research, the novelty of the research and its relevance for the publication.

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.

Publishing Ethics Resource Kit

As part of our commitment to the protection and enhancement of the peer-review process, Elsevier has a responsibility to assist the scientific community in all aspects of publishing ethics.

To support our editors, we have developed the Publishing Ethics Resource Kit, or “PERK”. The aim of this kit is to act as a resource and provide advisory support for addressing queries about issues such as plagiarism, authorship disputes, multiple submission and/or publication, and research misconduct.

PERK is an online resource which contains links to Elsevier and non-Elsevier policy and procedures documents, decision trees and flow charts for dealing with different forms of publishing ethics abuse with the recommended action that can be followed, as well as COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics - www.publicationethics.org.uk) charts for a second opinion. It also contains examples of appropriate letters for various situations and a large resource of useful information structured in the form of Questions and Answers

As well as launching PERK we are also active in other publishing ethics initiatives. We recently enlisted all of our journals into COPE ensuring that our editors have an alternative authoritative source to refer to when dealing with complex ethical issues. We are the first major scientific publisher to do this.
www.elsevier.com/publishingethicskit