1. Elsevier’s position on Access

Elsevier is committed to Universal Access, Quality and Sustainability

• Universal Access 
  • Elsevier wants to enable the broadest possible access to quality research content in sustainable ways that meet our many constituents’ needs
  • We are committed to identify where remaining access gaps exist and find viable mechanisms to close them
  
  
• Quality
  • Peer review and publishing provide essential quality controls for researchers: we will uphold existing quality control levels and continually seek to find ways to advance the adoption of the highest ethical standards
  • We will invest to innovate in technologies that increase researchers’ productivity.
  
  
• Sustainability
  • Journal publishers invest heavily to deliver the benefits of a well-functioning scientific and medical communications system upon which society depends. Access and dissemination mechanisms must be sustainable to ensure that these investments can be recovered
  • The journal publishing system must also be sustainable for those who fund it. Therefore we aim constantly to increase overall system efficiency and value for purchasers.

2. Access: Current situation

STM journal publishers exist to provide essential services to researchers: notably the registration, quality assurance through peer review, dissemination, and perpetual archiving of primary research findings. STM journal publishers have invested over $3 billion since 1999 to digitise content and automate publishing functions with dramatic results for improved access, quality, and sustainability. Some recent facts are:

2.1 Access

• 93% of University researchers report¹ that access to journal articles is ‘easy or very easy’. Access to journals is 14th on researchers’ list of concerns (lack of funding is number one; too much paperwork is number five)
• The majority of researchers in other constituents such as R&D intensive corporations, SMEs, individual researchers and the public find access to journals ‘easy or fairly easy’²
• Journal articles are the easiest form of research content to access, while also being the most important according to researchers
• ScienceDirect, Elsevier’s online journal platform is used by around 14 million researchers globally. It hosts 10 million articles dating back to the 1820s and now has close to 600 million full text article downloads per year, approaching 2 million article downloads globally per day.

2.2 Quality

• 90% of researchers believe that peer review is essential
• The quality of the research experience has improved significantly: Researchers read from 25% more journals than in the mid-1990s and university faculty are reading 34% more articles³.
• STM publishers continue to invest heavily to advance researcher productivity further by:
  • Enhancing and enriching content with semantic searching, social-networking and visualisation tools, enabling delivery of journal content to mobile devices, and facilitating access to research datasets.
  • Extracting insights across articles via text mining and bibliometric tools, for example to map institutional and national research strengths to support strategic decision making and funding.
  • Collaborating to set up systems that facilitate permissions processing, that aim to detect and eliminate plagiarism, and that encourage the application of consistently high ethical standards.

2.3 Sustainability

• Publishers’ electronic licensing deals have developed so that most libraries now receive substantial volume discounts. Through these so-called “Big Deals” libraries can license access to previously unsubscribed titles at a fraction of the list price. As a result, libraries now access more titles but pay less per title than they did ten years ago.
• As the effective price paid per journal accessed has decreased, the number of journals accessed has increased, and the usage of those journals has grown by over 20% per year. Consequently, the average price paid per article downloaded has fallen by 80% since the late 1990’s.

3. Elsevier’s position on universal access and open access

• We are open to all business models and publishing mechanisms that can expand access to quality research content sustainably.
• We are not attached to any single business model or publishing mechanism. We believe a mix is the best way to meet the needs of all stakeholders
• “Universal Access” refers to our goal of enabling the broadest possible access to quality research content in ways that meet constituent specific needs sustainably. We see open access mechanisms as a sub-set of universal access mechanisms.
• Universal access mechanisms include (in alphabetical order):
  • Access for people with disabilities: There are commercial, ethical, and legal reasons that Elsevier is committed to increase accessibility for people with disabilities. Elsevier and many other publishers have been active in the area of accessibility since well before the 2007 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. There is a growing understanding of how publications can be modified to make them more accessible and the modest investments needed to audit and improve the accessibility of all our products and services also improves the experience of all readers. Elsevier has a User Centered Design team that ensures accessibility is considered at every stage of the development process for new products and services. In 2010 Elsevier won the first Publisher Lookup Accessibility award.
  • Information philanthropy: Elsevier is a founding partner in Research4Life, a public private partnerships providing journal content to researchers in the developing world. More than 1600 Elsevier journals are available in more than 100 developing countries.
  • Licensing: The high degree of satisfaction with electronic journal access is a result of widespread licensing and innovative licensing options from Elsevier and other STM publishers since 1999. As a result of initiatives by STM publishers, researchers now have better access than ever. In a recent PRC study, 93% of researchers responded that journal articles are very or fairly easy to access. Elsevier has developed a number of licensing options, including the freedom and subject collections.
  • Open access publishing models including Author Pays, Sponsored Articles, Delayed Access, and Manuscript posting. More information on these mechanisms is available here.
  • Public access initiatives: Elsevier supports access by the public to science, and actively works on sustainable mechanisms to achieve this. For example, ScienceDirect licences are written to allow the subscribing library to offer walk-in users access to ScienceDirect content for any subscribing library. Two initiatives help provide information to patients and their families. PatientINFORM is a program in which publishers and health organizations provide patients and their caregivers access to some of the most up-to-date research about specific diseases. Through DeepDyve, Elsevier offers patients and their families an option to rent articles from 100 journals for a small transaction fee.  
  • Transactional: Elsevier offers options to purchase single articles (Pay-per-view) and groups of articles (Article Choice). We also work in partnership with document delivery suppliers such as Ingenta and Subito.

1 Mark Ware. Access to professional and academic information in the UK: a survey of SMEs, large companies, universities & colleges, hospitals & medical schools, governmental & research institutes. Publisher Research Consortium, August 2009. Available at   http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/SMEAccessCompanionReport.pdf
2 Mark Ware   http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/SMEAccessCompanionReport.pdf, August 2009.
3 Dr. Carol Tenopir, ”  How Electronic Journals are Changing Reading Patterns”, April 2007.
4 Mark Ware http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/SMEAccessCompanionReport.pdf, August 2009.