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Comment by xipho | Hacker News Reader

At a semantic web meeting sometime back one of the heads of Elsevier reasearch during her talk blatantly stated that "Elsevier is not a publishing company", I noticed numerous heads raise at this comment. Elsevier sells services. They no longer need to publish, or worry about losing their publishing, because the big journals like Cell etc. are not going anywhere, and because they control enough of the published information that they can do other things.

They also know that their knowledge-base is worth massive $, they sell medical diagnostic tools, text etc. [0]. It doesn't take a Cellular Biologist to connect the dots to notice the huge potential conflict of interest. Controls publishing (on medical topics), sells diagnostics, $ for all this. I'd bet money they own insurance companies. Is it malicious? Who knows. Is it obvious that it could be abused, with certainty.

[0]:https://evolve.elsevier.com/education/medical-insurance-bill...

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Heard from an Elsevier person, their purpose is to own the market from the production to distribution and storage of scientific and medical information.

That explains their acquisition of mendeley, their work on lab notebooks, acquisition of medical diagnostics systems...

They own LexisNexis too. It’s an interesting philosophy where they seem to try to corner information that is free, or should. Then charge rents on top of it.

Nice. Didn't know about that one so I had to Wikipedia it: "LexisNexis is a corporation providing computer-assisted legal research (CALR) as well as business research and risk-management services." if anybody is wondering.

Wikipedia's description isn't very helpful sadly - they're like the real world data version of Microsoft or SAP, they have a ton of different products that are basically databases of data collected from a ton of different sources. Lawyers use LexisNexis to find research legal precedent and find the contact information of defendants to send cease and desists or where to serve them papers; universities and public schools use LexisNexis to search newspapers and other media; finance firms use it for various data feeds; and so on.

Oh wow I had no idea, now I want to have a look at it.

When you get done I suspect you will have a strong urge to take a shower and also a newer, deeper understanding of "ignorance is bliss"

Google are amateurs compared to LN....

Yep I gave it a try today semantic/faceted searching is really the next level of search... I wish we could do that for general web search

I work for Elsevier. About 2 years ago there was a big internal push to drive it home that we are now a data and analytics company and not a publisher.

I am pleased to hear it but a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Elsevier will cease being a publisher first when they stop selling access to journal articles. Until then they are a publisher first and an "analytics" firm second, regardless of corporate messaging.

Elsevier is a publisher, OK, and Google is a PC motherboard builder.

Given this, please consider some internal lobbying to publish all works under a free license, as a non-publisher should not care about others making copies of works it has published.

This is certainly important from a business perspective. For-profit publishing is a dead end. More and more venues are community-owned, and only the highest profile publications actually need the degree of professionalization that requires a large publishing house. By now, it is clear that the publishers cannot win this fight. And we see this in the concessions publishers make. IMHO, publishers can either milk the cow as long as it's possible and then die, or transform their business. My university just announced an Open Access agreement with Elsevier, and to me this looks like a confession on Elsevier's side that they will have to go OA in one way or another, or they'll lose their journals one by one. In my community, Elsevier has already lost journals to community-owned replacements.

> they sell medical diagnostic tools, text etc. [0].

If they actually do that, that is not represented in the link you provided. The whole page is about teaching materials about the field, and one piece of software to _simulate_ "real-world patient data systems".

On their whole website I couldn't find a single product/service that a company would use in their direct operative work (in contrast to training).

Sorry for the crummy link. See the LexisNexis comment above. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RELX.

Thanks for clarifying!

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