Reed Elsevier is much in the news during the last weeks. The financial results of 2007 have been reported, while the results of the second quarter of 2008 were published last week. Reed Elsevier senses strong business momentum and financial performance. It has a restructuring programme going which is on track to deliver further margin improvement. The sale of its education division Harcourt Education is fully completed; net proceeds of €2.7bn returned to shareholders.Of course there are two very important changes coming up. Crispin Davis, the CEO, will leave Reed Elsevier beginning of next year. No new person has been presented yet (question will be, whether this will be a woman). And another item on the list is the divestment of Reed Business Information, which is in progress. Reed Business Information no longer belongs to the core business and will be sold as a division. This will present some name problems. Will the company continue a Reed Elsevier or return back to the company name Elsevier or Elsevier Science. In the Netherlands Reed Elsevier still has a magazine named Elsevier; changing its name will murder the magazine.
So the multinational will turn into a one-segment publisher, namely a publisher of scientific information. It is the fourth step of the company to become a one-segment publisher. Elsevier began as a conglomerate of print plants and consumer, business and scientific publishers and over the years it sold off the division. The print plants were the first to go in the eighties. After that the newspapers in the consumer section had to go, followed by the book publishers. The business division which got a big impulse when Elsevier merged with Reed, is now up for sale. So by the end of the year Reed Elsevier will be solely a STM (Scientific, Technical, Medical) publisher and might be named Elsevier Science again. Elsevier will be a full fledged science publisher with mighty databases like Science Direct. Of course the new company will be faced with all kind of new initiatives in the academic publishing world: open access and the public library of science.
In the meantime Elsevier, the publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, builds out its cashing machine by making it easier readers and subscribers to its more than 2,800 online journals to purchase article reprints for a variety of uses. Elsevier is partnering with Copyright Clearance Center to use CCC's Rightslink(R) service, the world's leading online platform for marketing and monetizing the rights to content.
The new reprint-ordering capability, available now, follows Elsevier's initial adoption of Rightslink in 2007 to handle copyright permissions for Elsevier's journals. Rightslink is an online e-commerce service that allows content users to instantly license content and order reprints online. The most widely used web-based licensing application, Rightslink is in use on more than 11,000 journals, magazines and newspapers, as well as thousands of books online. Major publishers uses the services from Rightslink such as Dow Jones, The New York Times Company, Springer, Taylor & Francis, O'Reilly Media, Time Inc., Oxford University Press, Nature Publishing Group, The University of Chicago Press, Blackwell Publishing and USA Today. Rightslink lets the Elsevier journal readers efficiently order reprints directly from ScienceDirect content pages online, providing a fast and easy transaction. It is also integrated into the print-and-delivery business process.
ScienceDirect and Elsevier's Health Sciences platforms deliver more than 9 million articles online from more than 2,500 peer-reviewed journals published in 24 fields of science, technology and medicine. More than 1 billion articles have been downloaded from the ScienceDirect and Health Sciences platforms by scientists, teachers and researchers.
Blog Posting Number: 1179
Tags: scientific publishing, academic publishing, STM
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