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Mutinous librarians help drive change at Elsevier


a quiet revolution is sweeping the $20bn academic publishing market and its main operator Elsevier, partly driven by an unlikely group of rebels: cash-strapped librarians.

When Florida State University cancelled its “big deal” contract for all Elsevier’s 2,500 journals last March to save money, the publisher warned it would backfire and cost the library $1m extra in pay-per-view fees.

But even to the surprise of Gale Etschmaier, dean of FSU’s library, the charges after eight months were actually less than $20,000. “Elsevier has not come back to us about ‘the big deal’,” she said, noting it had made up a quarter of her content budget before the terms were changed.

Mutinous librarians such as Ms Etschmaier remain in a minority, but are one of a host of pressures bearing down on the subscription business of Elsevier, the 140-year-old publisher that produces titles including the world’s oldest medical journal, The Lancet.

The company is facing a profound shift in the way it does business, as customers reject traditional charging structures.

Open access publishing — the move to break down paywalls and make scientific research free to read — is upending the funding model for journals, at the behest of regulators and some big research funders, while online tools and the illicit Russian pirate-site Sci-Hub are taking readers.

Even Donald Trump’s administration in December began consulting on an executive order to “liberate” publicly funded research, according to people briefed on the process.

At risk is the profit powerhouse of Elsevier’s parent company, UK-listed Relx, Europe’s biggest media company by market capitalisation, which reports its annual results on Thursday. The academic division’s £2.5bn revenues are just a third of company turnover and grew at about 2 per cent in 2018. But the chunky margins — roughly 37 per cent — mean it accounted for 40 per cent of Relx’s operating profit.

So far Elsevier has defied doomsayers who have claimed it is a structurally compromised business.

But its willingness to experiment has increased markedly since Kumsal Bayazit, an Istanbul-born former management consultant, took over as chief executive last year. Admitting Elsevier’s transition to open access was too “slow”, she is now stepping up one of the big evolutions of the company’s history.