Elsevier Is Becoming a Data Company. Should Universities Be Wary?

Like many big research institutions, the University of Florida pays the publishing giant Elsevier millions of dollars a year so its scientists can read the articles they helped create.

Payments like that have made Elsevier an industry monolith; they have also made the company a popular target of faculty protests and boycotts.

At an institutional level, “there’s not a lot of leverage” to hold down prices, concedes Florida’s library dean, Judith C. Russell. That’s because Elsevier publishes many influential titles that faculty also prize as markers of reputational success, she said.

Now universities are reckoning with a new challenge — and the possibility that they will get into the same basic financial bind. Advanced computerization stands to make research data even more valuable to the scientific process than published articles. And once again a series of little-noticed choices could determine how much universities pay for it.

Ms. Russell faced one of her first such decisions just last year. Florida administrators and faculty asked her to compile data on the scientific impact of their university’s journal articles to help tout the institution’s research prowess.

An obvious candidate came to mind. She asked Elsevier.

Why turn to a company already derided by researchers as taking more than it should from the academic enterprise? As Ms. Russell explained, Elsevier’s journals are collectively the biggest publisher of University of Florida scientists, accounting for about 1,200 of the 8,000 articles the researchers produce each year.

Elsevier is also rapidly gaining, through growth and strategic acquisitions, the sophisticated tools necessary to make detailed comparative analyses of what it has already published. “It seemed like that was a good place to begin,” Ms. Russell said.

The resulting deal gave the University of Florida benefits that included easier pathways to Elsevier’s articles and data about them, the company said in a May 2016 announcement. Elsevier received no payment, but was granted insider access at Florida to help inform the company’s ongoing development of data-related products for universities. The opportunity to closely study researcher behaviors at a major U.S. institution “made it a natural choice to collaborate,” Elsevier said in the announcement.

Ms. Russell said she wasn’t exactly sure what Elsevier was getting out of the partnership. But she said she has “clearly observed” the company paying close attention to a variety of ways that scientists use data, learning about their terminologies, storage practices, and search preferences.

That interest isn’t surprising to experts who have studied Elsevier and its strategic moves to embed itself ever deeper into the academic-research life cycle. As universities have slowly pushed their scientists to embrace open-access journals, publishers will need new profit centers. Elsevier appears well ahead of the pack in creating a network of products that scientists can use to record, share, store, and measure the value to others of the surging amounts of data they produce.

“Maybe all publishers are going, or wish they were” going, in the direction of becoming data companies, said Vincent Larivière, an associate professor of information science at the University of Montreal. “But Elsevier is the only one that is there.”

A Suite of Services

Universities also recognize the future of data. Their scientists are already seeing that widely and efficiently sharing data in fields such as cancer research has enabled accomplishments that have demonstrably saved lives.

In their eagerness to embrace that future, however, universities may not be paying enough attention to what their choices of systems may eventually cost them, warned Roger C. Schonfeld, a program director at Ithaka S+R. With its comprehensive data-services network, Mr. Schonfeld wrote earlier this year, Elsevier appears ready “to lock in scientists to a research workflow no less powerful than the strength of the lock-in libraries have felt to ‘big deal’ bundles.”

He’s referring to Elsevier’s much-protested practice — which led to a 2012 boycott campaign by thousands of scholars — of charging high prices for journal subscriptions and then tying the availability of some of its most popular titles to the purchases of multiple other journals.

Elsevier, the biggest academic publisher, has regularly disputed charges of profiteering. Its own financial statements, however, point to its success in editing and assembling articles that others have researched, written, and peer-reviewed. The parent company of Elsevier reported $1 billion in profit on nearly $3 billion in revenue last year. That 37 percent margin was typical for the company and vastly higher than levels seen in almost any other industry.

As researchers’ focus moves from articles to data, there are two basic types at stake. The biggest category is data from research studies themselves — all the health statistics on patients, measurements of asteroids and plant growth, numerical tallies of jobs, chemicals, genes, neutrinos, public attitudes, and much more. The other category is data describing the published articles and their citation rates — often called metadata — which is typically sought by those studying, administering, or funding the scientific process itself.

Elsevier appears quite interested in both categories, Mr. Larivière said. Just last week Elsevier added to its dossier Bepress, a company founded in 1999 by three academics at the University of California at Berkeley that compiles research data to help universities showcase their accomplishments — a goal similar to that set for Ms. Russell by her colleagues at the University of Florida.

With its other divisions — such as Hivebench, Mendeley, Pure, and SSRN — Elsevier can now offer a nearly complete range of data-related services to scientists, from study design and grant application to laboratory note-taking and file-sharing, to publication and post-publication assessment of effects.

Such coordination of products almost certainly offers benefits to users. But universities’ desire for low-cost solutions — reflected at Florida in the request of Ms. Russell — also raises concerns that institutions might not be sufficiently watching the long-term cost.

The dilemma is reflected in young scientists such as Celine Cammarata, a graduate student in human ecology at Cornell University. Cornell is among at least two dozen institutions that have accounts with LabArchives, a web-based system for scientists to manage and share their lab notes and files. But after trying out LabArchives and a few others, Ms. Cammarata opted for Hivebench, a French lab-notebook system. Hivebench was purchased last year by Elsevier.

Hivebench, Ms. Cammarata said, had several advantages in terms of its layout, function and sharing features. In her role as a teaching assistant, Ms. Cammarata found Hivebench useful for sharing lab notebooks with her undergraduate students. And Hivebench has a mobile version, “which was really great,” she said, because she liked to use it with her iPad. LabArchives, by contrast, was “hard to deal with” and “not especially intuitive,” she said.

Not only does Elsevier have the deep pockets to acquire and build such products, but it also has the experience, access, and financial patience to get researchers to use and accept them. “Elsevier knows the scientists, and what they’re used to,” Ms. Cammarata said.

Elsevier describes its new data offerings as another means of serving scientists who freely choose to use them. “Researchers should remain in control of how and when their research data is accessed and used,” said Gemma Hersh, an open-access policy director at Elsevier.

In Search of Alternatives

Ms. Russell said she sees no reason to believe that Elsevier views its new partnership with Florida as part of a long-term strategy to draw the university into another expensive relationship. Instead, she sees her data project as Florida “taking advantage of” Elsevier’s willingness to help its journal customers at no additional charge.

Ms. Cammarata said she and her fellow scientists do care deeply about keeping their data truly free. “It’s definitely something that we should be thinking about,” she said.

But forcing scientists to use data-management tools that they regard as inferior — even if the name of open access and affordability — probably won’t work, Ms. Cammarata said. Like many people, scientists are pressed for time and “respond poorly to being told what to do,” she said.

Some open-access advocates say the situation points to an urgent need to create more robust nonprofit alternatives to Elsevier’s product line of data-compiling and sharing tools. But so far financial backing for the developmental work is thin. One of the best known attempts is the Open Science Framework, a web-based data interface built by the Center for Open Science, which has an annual budget of about $6 million, provided largely by foundations and other private donors.

In general, U.S. research universities — a $70 billion scientific enterprise — have not made major contributions to such projects. The Association of American Universities and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities have, however, formed a team that’s begun studying the future of data sharing. So far, that effort has been focused on more basic steps such as establishing data-storage facilities, linking them together, and simply persuading scientists to take seriously the need to share data.

Doing all that in ways that give universities long-term financial protection seems important, said a co-chair of the AAU-APLU effort, Sarah M. Nusser, vice president for research at Iowa State University. That concern is “on the radar” of the AAU-APLU team, Ms. Nusser said. “But we haven’t really sat down and talked about how one might go about that.”

A coalition of funders convened by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation also is studying open-access issues including data. Its members include the Gates, Sloan, and Arnold foundations, the latter of which has been a primary funder of the Center for Open Science. But that coalition also appears far from deciding whether to make a more aggressive push to help develop data-management tools for scientists in their labs, said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. The funders need to “walk before they run,” said Ms. Joseph, who is advising the group.

Help from Congress isn’t likely, said Claudio Aspesi, an industry analyst who has long studied Elsevier. That’s because the details of scientific data management are probably too complicated, and the affected scientific constituencies too diverse, to generate legislative momentum in any situation short of a private company making an overt and ill-advised claim to outright data ownership, Mr. Aspesi said.

Publishers themselves could be part of the solution, by offering data services that guarantee never to do anything that might hinder data freedom. Holtzbrinck owns Figshare, an online service for managing, storing, and sharing research data that has promised its customers that upon leaving for any reason, they will be guaranteed of getting back their data in a format that is fully translatable to a different computer system.

For its part, the Center for Open Science has sought university partnerships to help it grow, and it has accumulated about 30 so far. The center hasn’t yet made an aggressive push for universities to help finance its creation of data-management systems. That, however, could change soon, and universities hopefully will respond, said the center’s co-founder and director, Brian A. Nosek.

“Ultimately,” Mr. Nosek said, “if the research community wants to ensure that the public goods it produces remain public goods, then they need to invest in a public goods infrastructure that is governed and operated by the community itself.”

Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.

Correction (8/8/2017, 12:36 p.m.): This article originally misidentified the owner of Figshare, an online service for managing, storing, and sharing research data. It is Holtzbrinck, not Macmillan Publishers. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.