Elsevier wasn't the only publishing company that struggled in the precarious
years of the late 1980s. Robert Maxwell’s media empire began to crumble at the
end of the decade. Maxwell, who had once attempted a hostile takeover of
Elsevier, now approached the company, hoping to sell Pergamon — the jewel in
the crown. Pergamon, founded in 1948 and incorporated as Pergamon Press in
1951, was a company that specialized in founding new journals in emerging
areas of science, filling a need to respond to the rapid development of
scholarly subdisciplines that was not being addressed by the academic
societies. Pergamon’s 400 titles would make a superb addition to Elsevier’s
collection. Although the company produced many prestigious journals, its most
famous were Tetrahedron
and Tetrahedron Letters. Those journals were co-founded by Robert Burns
Woodward, a chemist who published his 1965 Nobel-Prize-winning work on the
synthesis of strychnine and respertine in Tetrahedron. Pergamon also published
Acta Metallurgica (now titled Acta
Materiala) and major reference works such as The
International Encyclopedia of Education and The Encyclopedia of
Material Science and Engineering. The addition of such titles promised not
only to enhance and expand the range of Elsevier’s list (adding a significant
social science program) but also to round out the international component of
the business, giving the company a large British presence. The £440 million
sale was finalized in 1991, a promising start to the new decade.
Acquiring
the prestigious English medical journal The
Lancet later that same year just put the icing on the cake. The
Lancet, which had been founded in 1823 by the radical independent physician
Thomas Wakely and retained his spirit of independence, had been at the leading
edge of medicine for over 160 years, breaking stories from the discovery of
penicillin in 1940 to HIV transmission in 1984. Acquiring The Lancet would
help put Elsevier at the head of the field of medical publishing as well as
scientific publishing.
Reed
No sooner, it seemed, had Elsevier completed its own merger with Pergamon and
acquired The
Lancet than the Elsevier NV parent company began negotiations
with Reed, a papermaking company turned media conglomerate with interests
ranging from women’s magazine publishing to trade printing to old-fashioned
papermaking. The 1993 Reed merger brought new strength to Elsevier Science
Publishers through the addition of the titles of Butterworth-Heinemann,
publisher of the so-called "Four American Journals." These four titles — The
American Journal of Cardiology, The
American Journal of Surgery, The
American Journal of Medicine, and, incongruously, Urology—
are all large-circulation subscription journals for medical practitioners.
Their addition added breadth to Elsevier’s growing healthcare publications.
The Reed
Elsevier merger was not all about titles however, and with it
came the predictable challenges of large-scale operational change.
Globalization
Although there had been much talk of integration and restructuring over the
previous few years, the Reed merger clearly created an imperative for action.
Thus, in the early 1990s, Elsevier management implemented a deliberate new
policy of globalization. First they implemented a single organizational
structure within the company. Previously, Elsevier had been a federalist
entity, with its divisions separated by geographic boundaries, a structure
that caused unnecessary overlap. Now the company was to be reorganized along
product lines, grouping together like products and staff in a way that
reflected the lack of international barriers in science itself. Next, Elsevier
implemented a new international editorial structure — designed to bring
together and strengthen the company’s considerable, yet geographically
dispersed, editorial resources. An international editorial structure
encouraged new cooperative editorial boards to not only share resources but to
combine knowledge and expertise.
Although the new organizational and editorial structures helped the company
achieve a sense of global identity, there was still a need for the newly
expanded company to realize a shared identity, a shared history. This took a
little more time. It would be the technological revolution that the company
experienced at the end of the 1990s that gave everyone in the company the
opportunity to share a genuine historic moment — the successful launch of
electronic science publishing — what M. Stuart Lynn has described as "the
second Gutenberg Revolution."2
Electronic Distribution
From the very beginning of the 1990s (and earlier) the company had been aware
of a pressing need to develop electronic systems and services to revolutionize
the way Elsevier delivered information. From 1991 to 1995 Elsevier conducted
what even competitors would agree was the largest experiment of its kind in
this period, the TULIP project. TULIP
was an experimental university licensing program that tested new methods of
electronic journal distribution over local university networks. The program
began by delivering 42 Elsevier and Pergamon journals in materials science and
engineering — about 2,000 pages weekly — to nine American universities (16
counting all eight campuses of the University of California) and grew to over
80 journals by the final year. The system was both important and impressive,
but not without its teething problems. Although TULIP did distribute the
information as promised, this experiment started in the pre-web browser era,
and therefore each university had to develop its own implementation for the
locally hosted files, a task that proved to be a great challenge for some
partners. Nevertheless the program was an extraordinary innovation, one that
would lead straight to a commercial offering of all journals for local hosting
(Elsevier Electronic Subscriptions) and then to the hugely successful ScienceDirect®.
In 1997, after almost two decades of experimentation with information
technology, Elsevier launched ScienceDirect,
a web-accessible online full-text database of Elsevier’s entire STM journal
collection. ScienceDirect marked a revolution in the way scientists accessed,
retrieved and shared information around the world. Selling this new service
called for the creation of an international network of regional sales offices
(including the expansion of the Asia
Pacific office), another major investment in building
sophisticated new expertise. The company’s digital revolution created other
new challenges, not least of which was the question of how to preserve digital
information indefinitely while still ensuring easy access, regardless of the
changing nature of technology.
Digital Archives
In a first step towards the creation of a complete archive of a unified
collection of Elsevier publications, in 2002 the company embarked on a digital
preservation project with Koninklijke
Bibliotheek (KB), the National Library of the Netherlands.
Elsevier provided the library with digital copies of its entire ScienceDirect
journal collection (including backfiles of The
Lancet dating back 180 years and backfiles of all of its
journals back to volume 1, number 1, the result of a $40 million investment
Elsevier made to capture its entire journal heritage in digital form). In
turn, Koninklijke Bibliotheek created the first independent digital archive of
Elsevier’s publishing history. Realizing the significance of the KB
collaboration, today Elsevier has continued to explore archiving initiatives
with other institutions around the world, in an ongoing effort to ensure
maximum protection for the archive.
These archival projects
are on a scale never before imagined, as by the year of its anniversary — 2005
— Elsevier has grown into the largest STM publishing company, producing more
than 1,800 journals and more than 3,000 new books each year. Part of the
company’s growth came through the traditional acquisition of unique companies
that added breadth and depth to the Elsevier range of products, such as MDL
(Molecular Designs Limited), a software development company serving the
pharmaceutical, agrochemical and biotechnology industries; Engineering
Information, an electronic engineering information distribution company, home
to Engineering
Village 2™; and Cell Press,
publisher of the prestigious journal Cell. Founded in 1974 as "a journal of
exciting biology" by Dr. Benjamin Lewin, Cell is notable for publishing such
Nobel Prize-winning breakthroughs as Infectious Prion Proteins and Olfactory
Receptor Cloning. The acquisition of such properties clearly enhanced both
Elsevier’s collection of titles and products as well as its reputation.
Harcourt
However, the company’s most dramatic growth at the start of the new millennium
was achieved, of course, after Harcourt put
itself up for sale and most of it was acquired by Reed
Elsevier, including an educational publishing group that became
a fourth piece in the Reed Elsevier collection (along with Elsevier in science
and medicine, LexisNexis in law and Reed
Business in trade magazines and exhibitions). Harcourt brought with it
a long and rich medical publishing heritage courtesy of imprints like Mosby,
Saunders and Churchill Livingstone. To name but a few of their publishing
achievements, those three companies between them have produced The
Harriet Lane Handbook, Total Patient Care,
the original Gray’s
Anatomy, Dorland’s
Medical Dictionary, The
Cecil Textbook of Medicine, Noyes
Modern Clinical Psychiatry, Mosby’s Medical Nursing and Allied
Health Dictionary, Robbins
& Cotran’s Pathologic Basis of Disease, and Miller’s
Anatomy of the Dog, a text which originally made W.B. Saunders America’s
leading veterinary publisher. Additionally, in the Harcourt purchase Elsevier
acquired MD
Consult, a unique electronic reference service for doctors and
healthcare providers, used widely in American medical schools and hospitals.
Soon after, in May 2002, Elsevier further added to its offerings for medical
practitioners with the acquisition of Hanley & Belfus, Inc., a
Philadelphia-based publisher founded in 1984 by John Hanley and Linda Belfus
(former W.B. Saunders executives). Hanley & Belfus produces texts for medical
students that are renowned for being reader-friendly: its Secrets Series
offers an innovative interactive approach to medical textbook publishing.
A Rich History
Although the list of titles and products added to the Elsevier collection via
the process of mergers and acquisitions is impressive, no list can convey the
richness of the publishing history that accompanies those titles and products.
When Elsevier acquired W.B. Saunders — founded by Walter Burns Saunders in
1888 in Philadelphia — in the Harcourt purchase it also acquired a special
piece of American history: the story of The Kinsey Report. That story mirrors
the history of science as well as science publishing: risky, unpredictable,
daring and potent with intellectual reward. In the 1930s Alfred Kinsey had
conducted in-depth interview-based research on sexual behavior, determined to
redress a yawning gap in the scientific record. Anticipating the interest of a
small audience of psychiatrists and other professionals, the publisher
Lawrence Saunders authorized a small first printing (25,000 copies) of what he
considered a limited-audience medical book. To his surprise, upon its release
in 1948 The Kinsey Report sold out within two days, in spite of opposition
from conservative political and religious groups, because it offered Americans
the first publicly available, frank and scientific discussion of sex. The
Kinsey Report, which took a daring step away from the traditional medical
textbook collection of Saunders, would prove the company’s willingness to push
the boundaries of social norms to advance scientific knowledge.
Indeed
all the companies acquired by Elsevier in the Harcourt acquisition brought
something special to the Elsevier collection. Academic Press, a company
started in the U.S. in 1942 by two European science publishers, Walter Johnson
and Kurt Jacoby, who had fled the Nazis, brought with it a tradition of
intellectual rigor that paralleled that of Elsevier. The company’s most
important title, Virology,
was edited for many years by another refugee from war-torn Europe, the Italian
Salvador Luria who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1969 for his
discovery of the replication mechanism and genetic structure of viruses.
Gray's Anatomy
The Harcourt acquisition also added the titles of Churchill Livingstone, a
medical publishing company originally established in London as J&A Churchill
in 1728, that boasted a list of medical books dating back to 1688. The most
famous of all Churchill Livingstone publications is Gray’s
Anatomy. Up until the mid-nineteenth century the study of
anatomy was limited to the dissection rooms of teaching hospitals and
pocket-sized textbooks with tiny illustrations. Hoping to create a useful tool
for the medical students he taught at St. George’s Hospital in London, Dr.
Gray wrote a new text that was simultaneously more detailed, clear and
confident than existing texts. He then recruited his friend Henry Carter to
provide large and highly detailed illustrations. The result, first published
in 1858, was the first edition of what would become one of the best-selling
medical books of all times. Today in its 39th edition, and now available
electronically as well as in print, Gray’s Anatomy continues to innovate with
its descriptions of radiological anatomy and new microanatomy images.
