Democratising Knowledge: A Report on the Scholarly Publisher, Elsevier
[Jonathan Tennant] Executive Summary: Elsevier are the largest and most powerful scholarly publisher, a status achieved through a long history of mergers and acquisitions and rigorously capitalistic business practices. The core issues surrounding Elsevier are that it operates its business primarily through charging for what should be public knowledge and education, with aggressive pricing strategies and marketing tactics that are anti-competitive and a drain on the higher and further education sectors. It has a long history of fighting against public access to knowledge, through a combination of political lobbying, public campaigns against openness, and regressive business models and strategies.
