Crisis

In the late 1960s, things stopped going quite so well, not only for Elsevier, but for all scholarly Dutch publishers. An unfortunate confluence of events conspired to create a crisis for the Dutch publishing industry. The trouble began in the late 1960s when everywhere in the world, starting in the U.S., universities ceased expanding, reducing the rate of growth in the demand for scholarly publications. At the same time, labor costs in the Netherlands rose precipitously and once inexpensive books and journals from Holland became costly. In response to the rising cost of books and journals, libraries expanded their interlibrary loan (ILL) programs as a way to compensate for their inability to purchase complete inventories of scholarly titles. These expanded ILL programs were facilitated by the phenomenon of photocopying, making Xerox® a surprise new factor in an already tight market.

Thus by the beginning of the 1970s, older expectations of the continuous expansion of Dutch international journal production were significantly curtailed — and as a result the viability of newer journals was threatened. Whereas in the early 1960s a journal could break even in three to five years, by the mid-70s, a maturation period of seven to eight years became more normal. The prognosis for the future growth of the companies that published these scholarly journals was not as good as it had seemed a decade earlier. Responding to the industrywide crisis, a number of scientific publishing companies joined forces, choosing to pool resources rather than continue running expensive individual operations. Thus began a decade of mergers for Elsevier.

Mergers

The first came in 1970 when Elsevier and North Holland merged, a natural partnering of two friendly and complementary businesses. Next, in 1971, came a merger with Excerpta Medica an old and innovative medical abstracts company. Excerpta Medica, an international medical publishing company in business since the 1940s, was currently in the process of creating an electronic database that would contain abstracts of all medical literature published in all languages. That database, born of neurosurgeon-turned-publisher Pierre Vinken’s personal notes, was ultimately to become EMBASE, a product which Elsevier launched in 1972 in its first venture into the field of information technology. The work of Excerpta Medica was a good fit with the work of Elsevier and North Holland, and as the newly named Associated Scientific Publishers, the three merged companies set out to be the premier provider of international science and medical information.

The most significant expansion effected by the newly merged science group occurred in the U.S., where a large-scale foray into clinical medical publishing put the company on the map in American medical publishing, expanding the scope of the business as a whole. In the late 1970s Elsevier won its first contracts for large medical society journals, including the journal Gastroenterology, the most highly cited journal in the field of gastroenterology and hepatology. The production of such journals represented a significant shift of scale for Elsevier, as well as a change in market. Whereas previously the company’s largest journals — such as Artificial Intelligence, Brain Research and Nuclear Physics— had circulations of approximately 1,500-2,000, the company’s new medical society journals had circulations ranging from 15,000 to almost 30,000, representing a sizeable change in the scale of production for Elsevier. Furthermore, these large-scale journals sold advertising space to pharmaceutical companies, a new working challenge for Elsevier but also a new source of revenue. Taking on such challenges built international recognition for the Elsevier name in the world of clinical medicine.

Expansion

The success of the clinical medical publishing venture encouraged further confident expansion and a new emphasis on volume growth that made for heady times at the growing company. Throughout the decade, the company would expand in multiple directions, establishing its presence in many new geographic as well as publishing arenas. For example, in 1984, Elsevier established its French office in Paris, having successfully negotiated the rights to publish the journals of the renowned Institut Pasteur. Today, the French division of the company is best known for its publication of the Encyclopédie Médico-Chirurgicale, a familiar multi volume series that is subscribed to by almost half of France’s 200,000 French doctors and specialists, and that can be seen in the background of many French films and TV series featuring doctors’ offices.

The optimism of early 1980s expansion was also reflected in the company’s willingness to fund experimentation. During this period, the company developed a "let a thousand flowers bloom" policy, encouraging many small exploratory electronic projects in the hope that out of all that experimentation would come some real, useable, innovation. The "let a thousand flowers bloom" policy reflected the exploratory and scientific bent of Elsevier’s core personality and would ultimately prove very successful — even if most of the ideas did not bloom immediately.

Information Technology

Given the scientific background of so many Elsevier staff, there was, not surprisingly, an early awareness of developing information technology and a strong sense of its importance. The company was quick to imagine the promise such technology held for the publishing business. As early as 1979, responding to the need for an article delivery system that could compete with Xerox and interlibrary programs, Elsevier brought together a group of publishers for an exciting and novel electronic journal distribution project — Adonis. Adonis was the company’s first attempt to deliver documents, via new technology, faster and less expensively than anyone else. Adonis was to be the information delivery system of the 1980s and science publishing’s greatest new innovation. Unfortunately, the idea didn’t work as well in practice as in theory. The earliest technology developed by the Adonis project proved far more expensive than prevailing manual document delivery systems — and too expensive for customers. When finally, almost a decade later, the cheaper alternative of CD-ROMs for PCs became available, the Adonis project was reinvigorated. Unfortunately however, the impracticality of long runs of journals on CD-ROMs also proved to be commercially unattractive, and the ambitious and expensive Adonis project was finally abandoned. In spite of the project’s ultimate failure, however, the early IT experiments it initiated (along with those developed by others) would eventually evolve into the systems used today on personal computers, proving that the investment was well worth it in the end.

Fluctuating Prices

Nobody knew this at the time, however. The investment in new technologies proved frustratingly slow to yield results and by the end of the 1980s, Elsevier had little to show its customers for a decade of work on information delivery systems.Worse still, the company was facing a public relations crisis in the U.S. as a result of the fluctuating exchange rate. As the U.S. dollar lost ground against the Dutch guilder, the cost of Elsevier’s international journals to its U.S. clients rose. Pricing journals in the currency of the country of publication (Dutch guilders, U.K. and Irish pounds, Swiss francs, etc.) meant that the customer bore the risk of exchange rate fluctuation, and the fluctuations were great from year to year. This situation was ultimately remedied when the company began pricing in the local currency of its three major customer groups (U.S. dollars, euros and yen). Until such remedies were instituted, however, librarians blamed the company for their rising purchase costs, a problem that was compounded by the tightening of library budgets. This tension with science publishing’s greatest ally, the librarian, was a demoralizing new phenomenon for the company. As the company moved forward into the 90s then, it faced some key new issues — namely how to best serve customers and librarians in times of strained library budgets and rapid technological change.

The Revolution