Intellectual property, in particular, copyright (rights in editorial content), trademarks (rights in brands for services or journals), and database rights, form the legal basis of Elsevier's publishing, services and communications businesses. Elsevier embraces the opportunities the digital environment offers for communication and access, while at the same time recognizing the new risks that this environment poses: the ease with which unauthorized copies can be made and distributed worldwide.  

Our Objective

We aim to manage digital rights and brands amidst the structural changes that the "information society" represents, while at the same time recognizing the shared goals we have with our customers and authors. These include providing the widest possible distribution of scientific and medical content and services in a financially sustainable business model.

Elsevier wants to ensure a proper balance between the scholarly rights which authors retain (or are granted/transferred back in some cases) and the rights granted to Elsevier that are necessary to support our subscription, transactional and services-oriented business models. We constantly analyze and modify our policies to ensure we are responding to authors’ needs and concerns, and the concerns generally of the research and scholarly communities. We also want to provide the most cooperative and liberal policy possible in today's digital environment, consistent with sound commercial practice.

Journal Article Authors

Our current policies are that journal article authors are granted or retain, without charge or requesting permission from Elsevier, 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 process) on their personal or institutional web site or server, with a link (through the DOI) to the article as published, provided that the complete citation for the article is included and such postings are not used for commercial purposes (as defined below);
• 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.

Please note: Commercial purposes include the posting by companies or their employees for use by customers (e.g. pharmaceutical companies and physician-prescribers); commercial exploitation such as directly associating posting with advertising; the charging of fees for document delivery or access; or the systematic distribution to others via e-mail lists or list serves (to parties other than known colleagues), whether for a fee or for free.

Books, Reference Works and Handbooks

As regards books, reference works and handbooks, Elsevier authors are granted or retain, without charge or requesting permission from Elsevier, provided the work and Elsevier as publisher are appropriately identified, the right to:

• make copies (print or electronic) of Excerpts (up to 10% of their contribution to the work) for their own personal use, including for their own classroom teaching use or for internal training in corporate environments;
• To post summaries of the work on Internet web sites;
• Patent and trademark rights and rights to any process or procedure described in the work;
• To draw upon the work and to refer to or include Excerpts in preparing an article for publication in a scholarly or professional journal, in contributions to symposia, in a single chapter of another book or work and in similar derivative works; and
• To present the work at a professional or scientific meeting or conference and to provide copies of Excerpts to the delegates attending the meeting or conference.