Talk:Elsevier

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War period

I tried to add some information to the history about war, but NightHeron rightly noticed the Elsevier's source can be biased. Nevertheless, I think the war period should be described because it is an important milestone for Elsevier. But I found just articles on it's web, any idea for others? https://www.elsevier.com/connect/in-the-shadow-of-the-nazis-this-young-executive-dared-to-publish-the-work-of-jewish-scientists --Karlaz1 (talk) 13:22, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with reliable secondary sources on the history of Elsevier. I think many readers would be interested in how Elsevier functioned during the War, when the Netherlands was occupied by the Germans. The sentence I reverted could be interpreted as saying either that (1) they began focusing on exiled scientists in 1937 and continued throughout the War even after the Germans invaded in 1940, or else (2) they only began in 1937 and soon after had to stop and start obeying Nazi policies because of the German occupation of their country. The history of Elsevier during this period is unclear to me. NightHeron (talk) 14:31, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the clarification. So I think we could use some information from this another source (although it is on Elsevier website I don't think it is misleading), what do you think?

In May 1939 – as the Nazis were burning down the Warsaw ghetto and preparing to invade other countries – Klautz established the Elsevier Publishing Company Ltd. in London to distribute these academic titles in the British Commonwealth (except Canada). When the Nazis invaded and occupied the Netherlands for the duration of five years from May 1940, he had just founded a second international office, the Elsevier Publishing Company Inc. in New York. https://www.elsevier.com/connect/in-the-shadow-of-the-nazis-this-young-executive-dared-to-publish-the-work-of-jewish-scientists Karlaz1 (talk) 15:57, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

That sounds interesting and worth including, provided there's a reliable secondary source to back it up. I believe that Elsevier is not a reliable source about itself except for straightforward factual data. NightHeron (talk) 18:16, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Who is "Klautz"? The link is obsolete! Nayano2 (talk) 10:39, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Showing how unwise it would be to use Elsevier marketing material as source... It's probably this "J.P. Klautz (1904–1990)" mentioned in an IOS Press employee booklet (Fredriksson, Einar H. (2001). The Dutch Publishing Scene: Elsevier and North-Holland. IOS Press. pp. 61–76. doi:10.3233/978-1-58603-148-0-61.). I've not checked whether this author has a conflict of interest, but the reliance on private Elsevier archives suggests a degree of dependence from Elsevier. Nemo 13:35, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Undue and Recentism

I just did a quick read through of this article out of curiosity and I believe it suffers from WP:UNDUE and WP:RECENTism. I feel it unduly focuses on the criticisms of the company's business model. While I believe such a section is warranted, as the company is frequently criticised by academics, the aricle currently is totally dominated by complaints in all sections after the Company Statistics, being over half of the total word count. Furthermore, these complaints are almost all from the 21st century. The company is over a 140 years old, but almost all of the text is related to complaints about the company from the last 20 years. In my opinion, these 2 problems make the article weak as an encyclopedia article and verge on violating WP:NPOV. Ashmoo (talk) 07:50, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

WP:RECENTISM concerns “articles [that] tend to focus on recent events…current news breaks.” It does not mean a focus on the current century. Concerning WP:UNDUE, did you find any of the criticisms in the article to be petty or very minor? To me they generally seem to concern important matters that merit coverage. NightHeron (talk) 08:24, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

The article is indeed unbalanced. For example, there is a list of disputes with academic institutions, but apart from MIT, all have been resolved. Eg: Germany; Hungary; Norway; Taiwan; University of California. There is no mention of these resolutions in the article. Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a propaganda channel for critics of commercial publishers.

Here are some links:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/germany-finally-seals-milestone-publishing-deal-elsevier#:~:text=The%20September%20agreement%20comes%20from,The%20Lancet%2C%20rising%20by%204

https://cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2021/03/16/uc-secures-landmark-open-access-deal-with-worlds-largest-scientific-publisher/

https://www.openscience.no/aktuelt/agreement-reached-elsevier

https://sciencebusiness.net/network-updates/elsevier-and-consortium-core-electronic-resources-taiwan-establish-agreement

https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/hungary-and-elsevier-agree-pilot-national-license-for-research-access-and-open-access-publishing-814398047.html

I shouldn't edit, because I work for Elsevier' parent company. Francophile9 (talk) 09:04, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for those sources. I added that information to the section on open access. NightHeron (talk) 11:04, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

@NightHeron – This was partially reverted (with copyediting!) as the material is not reliably sourced. Burden is upon those seeking inclusion. Ideally, they should come back with a proper request and proper sources. -- dsprc ^[talk] 17:12, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

@Francophile9 – We parrot WP:RS (given the above: you should definitely go review), and what upstream finds notable. If the majority of coverage from RS is of a particular nature, then a Wikipedia article will be of similar nature. Wikipedia is warts and all – We don't censor material nor engage in hagiography to make multinational corporate conglomerates look nice. -- dsprc ^[talk] 10:19, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

This is so naive. There's plenty of coverage that shows that these disputes have been settled. It's just that such sources don't fit the narrative of those that believe that commercial publishers shouldn't be involved in the diffusion of scholarly knowledge. The result is the page is massively unbalanced, and does little credit to the credibility of Wikipedia. It's not a question of hagiography, but simple intellectual honesty. Francophile9 (talk) 10:49, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Again: please review WP:RS so we can avoid having trash like PR Newswire or other SPS being dropped in edit requests (please review that as well). If you have some evidence of particular contributors acting in bad-faith: please address such matters on their Talk pages or the appropriate noticeboards. Otherwise, please refrain from making disparaging comments of others, or insinuating there is some malicious conspiracy suppressing The Truth™ about RELX. This is not a soapbox to air grievances. Thank you. -- dsprc ^[talk] 16:24, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Please have a look at the RELX Talk page, where articles from The Guardian, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Bloomberg aren't considered valid sources. Those aren't "trash" like PR Newswire (although you might like to know that public company announcements are all vetted by lawyers before being disseminated). Talk:RELX Whereas a random website run by one person is viewed as a valid source. https://www.climaterightscoalition.com/ Francophile9 (talk) 10:13, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

There's nothing odd or recentist about this article being focused on the last few decades, because that's the period when Elsevier became what it is. Elsevier published about 10 million papers in 2001–2020 and only 8 million before that. It's not surprising or worrying if a majority of the reliable sources and topics correspond with the majority of the activity of the company.

Complaining that there's little about the early 100 years of history is like complaining that the article on Purdue Pharma focuses on the 20 years of history when it sold OxyContin rather than the 100+ years when it didn't, or that an article about some olympic winner who retired at 40 has little to say about the second half of their life. Nemo 16:43, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

Possible improvements

The latter sections of this article don't strike me as particularly relevant or helpful at times. Should we perhaps resolve the stand-alone "Who's Afraid of Peer Review" into another section? The respective article only mentions Elsevier in passing after all, stating that: "Many of the journals that accepted the paper are published by prestigious institutions and publishing companies, including Elsevier, SAGE, Wolters Kluwer – through its subsidiary Medknow (Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals) – and several universities." (Who's Afraid of Peer Review?)

I am also unsure if "Albanian politician Taulant Muka" is a credible source to attribute possible plagiarism to Elsevier journals. To be honest, I really don't understand the purpose of that whole section. Every non-fiction publisher tries to prevent plagiarism. Easterlin2 (talk) 18:16, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

My recent edit

@NightHeron The edit summary states why I made the changes I made, which were significantly more involved than a mere "unjustified large-scale removal of content". It was a restructuring of the whole section because it has a cleanup template on it for being too long. Some removed material was already mentioned elsewhere, some of it I wrote into other sections of the article for conciseness, and at one point I removed a citation to a blog post (WP:RSSELF). If you have an issue with one of the changes then by all means do revert that part of the edit and build upon the rest instead of undoing the whole edit I spent over an hour working on.
⹃Maltazarian ^{ᚾparleyinvestigateᛅ} 08:47, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

You'll have to do this via separate edits. That way other editors can (if needed) revert the specific components that they don't agree with. It's not reasonable to compel other editors to do the more specific work; the burden will be on you for that. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 09:08, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

There isn't really any PAG backing for that claim. It's not really reasonable to ask an editor to do a lot of work to accomodate every possible objection just because someone doesn't want to take a minute to say what they're objecting to. If one wishes to revert they have to at the very least state why they are reverting on the talk page. This is a don't throw the baby out with the bathwater situation.

Fortunately for you I happen to not mind helping other editors in their editing, so while I certainly don't think your request is reasonable as a demand I'm more than happy to treat it as a plea for help and accomodate it. I will do so later.
⹃Maltazarian ^{ᚾparleyinvestigateᛅ} 17:42, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

Voilà ⹃Maltazarian ^{ᚾparleyinvestigateᛅ} 23:25, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for splitting the edit into smaller pieces, these were more understandable. I've followed up on some of them. I've also removed the template about the section supposedly being "too long". It's not, and we do not need any "restructuring" for the sake of it. Nemo 18:26, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

source on the pronunciation?

how do we know how we should pronounce this name? ~2026-39452-88 (talk) 16:26, 25 September 2026 (UTC)