The Bookseller (http://www.thebookseller.com), the leading business magazine for the book industry, profiles Elsevier CEO Ron Mobed, who talks about changes in the company's communication strategy; the role of technology in digital content, and open access. Free access to the article is provided courtesy of The Bookseller.

1. 08 interview
ELSEVIER
14.03.14
www.thebookseller.com
students every day. But we weren’t
really able to share what we learned
from that across the entire company,
so we needed new systems.”The
company also ramped up Elsevier
Connect, which directs users to
its various social media platforms
across its many disciplines.
Has it worked? Has Elsevier won
hearts and minds?“We are getting a
lot of positive anecdotal response of
people saying Elsevier has changed,
which is nice, but the funny thing is
I don‘t think we have changed our
business. We’ve just become better
at communicating what we do.”
SIZE MATTERS
In academic, education and
professional publishing, size—
particularly when success can be
dependent on delivering digital
platforms and worldwide tech
projects—matters. Elsevier has
it in spades. Parent Reed Elsevier
released its full-year 2013 results at
the end of February, with Mobed’s
Elsevier business generating
revenues of £2.13bn and operating
profits of £826m, up 3% and 6%
respectively. (Overall, Reed Elsevier’s
turnover and operating profit was
£6.1bn and £1.7bn.)
Elsevier is Reed Elsevier’s biggest
division, worth 35% of the overall
group’s sales and 46% of its profit.
Listen and lead
The London-born boss of the world’s second biggest publisher
talks lessons learned and being a steward for tech and content
£2.13bn
Elsevier’s 2013 revenue
£826m
Elsevier’s operating
profit, 2013
175m
Full text journal article
downloads in 2003 through
Elsevier ScienceDirect
BY tom tivnan
I
t was not an absolute deal-
breaker, but one of the
conditions of Elsevier’s
acquisition of London-based digital
start-up Mendeley last year was that
Elsevier boss Ron Mobed would
meet with Mendeley staff to explain
the ins and outs of the deal—while
wearing a Mendeley T-shirt.
Mobed was game (and got a free
T-shirt out of it), and the episode—
in which the often suited-and-
booted c.e.o. of what is effectively
the world’s second-biggest
publisher enthusiastically addressed
hipster Clerkenwell digerati—
neatly sums up part of Elsevier’s
communication strategy under
Mobed: more direct engagement
with its customers and community.
The strategy, Mobed freely
admits, came out of lessons learned
from The Cost of Knowledge,
a 2012 boycott of Elsevier by
researchers who objected to the
what they said was the high cost
of the STM giant’s journals. The
controversy raged, and Elsevier
had difficulty responding and
participating in the debate, partly
because of its corporate structure.
“We didn’t have many avenues to
engage with the community except
in formal ways,”Mobed says.“So our
responses were very standoffish. We
were indulging in corporate-speak
and most of the conversation was
taking place without us. I thought
we had to get on top of this.
Elsevier as a company has always
been a little bit low-profile, a bit
modest about the things it does. It
is a virtue, but taken to extremes it
can be counterproductive.”
Mobed tackled this internally:
“Our staff obviously have personal
contacts with academics,
researchers, practitioners and
key
facts

2. 09interview
ELSEVIER
14.03.14
www.thebookseller.com
It is the world’s largest journals
publisher with over 2,000 peer-
reviewed titles (second-placed
Springer has the equivalent number
of titles, but it generates far less
income; Elsevier’s journals operating
profit is roughly akin to Springer’s
journals revenue). A whopping 72%
of Elsevier’s revenue comes from
digital products.
For geographical spread, Elsevier’s
bread and butter is still in the
developed world, with 68% of its
2013 revenues coming from Europe
(30%) and North America (38%).
The company is seeing gains in
the predictable growth markets—
China, Brazil, India, etc—partially
because more research is coming
out of these territories. Mobed says:
“This is not new, but what is much
more visible is the sheer scale—
with no slowdown. There is massive
growth, yet the percentage of
growth rates is still very high.”
engineering success
The digital share will undoubtedly
rise in coming years as Elsevier
continues to experiment with
more ways of delivering content
digitally. Perhaps it is just as well
that Mobed’s career has been
largely in the technology sector.
The Londoner studied engineering
at Cambridge and worked for
petroleum company Schlumberger,
and various energy and tech firms
for over 20 years, before moving
to Cengage in 2009 to head its
Academic & Professional Group.
He joined Elsevier in 2011 to
lead the science and technology
divisions, before getting the top job
a year later.
Does his non-publishing
background help? He pauses and
chuckles slightly.“Well, you’ll have
to ask other people and publishers
that. But my career has been mostly
about thinking how to get high-
quality content in different formats
to the end user, which is not that
much different from what I do now.”
Recent acquisitions point to
Elsevier’s ongoing digital intent.
Mendeley—which was bought for
a rumoured £45m last April—is
a part referencing platform, part
social media site. When the deal
was announced there was some
trepidation and dissent among
users, but that has largely gone
away, primarily because Elsevier
has kept the Mendeley team and
business intact.“We know it will
work if we let Mendeley keep on
being Mendeley, but give it the
support of a larger organisation.”So
far, so good; Mendeley surpassed
2.5 million users last autumn and
Mobed says numbers are“strong
and on target”.
Other tech deals in the past two
years include the purchases of
Knovel, a web-based search tool
for engineers; Atira, whose main
product is research management
software Pure; and Quosa, a
company that develops research
productivity software. And there
has been huge investment in
Elsevier’s own-grown platforms,
such as ScienceDirect.
However, Mobed is quick to
point out that Elsevier is not just
a tech company.“This is a content
business: the acquisition and
production of content, the curation
“Taking our cue from
the Finch Report, a
couple of years ago we
saw that our Gold
[author pays] Open
Access programme was
slightly lower than the
world average, so we
aimed in the next few
years to accelerate, to
move ahead to
proportionally.
We don’t want to be
massively ahead of the
industry in our OA
programmes; we don’t
want to be massively
behind either. We know
that OA models can
succeed but if they are
implemented poorly,
they can have quite
detrimental
consequences. We can
tell when we talk about
this to our smaller
society groupings; they
are keenly aware that
research ecosystems
are delicate. When you
make a change over
here, you have to think
that doesn’t have an
impact over there,
which can be damaging.
We want to make OA
work. But we feel
obligated to point out
where the pitfalls might
be so we can steer
away from those.
Sometimes people
say we are motivated by
self-interest, and I can
fully understand why
people might think that.
But because we are
staffed by researchers
in the main, and we
have been in the
business of serving
science for over 130
years and we want to be
in business for another
130 years, we have to
think about the interesst
of the community. When
we make these
interventions, we do it
for science.
mobed on
open access
46%
Percentage of Reed
Elsevier’s operating profit
generated by Elsevier, 2013
72%
Percentage of Elsevier’s
revenue that came from
digital ventures, 2013
23%
Percentage of Elsevier’s
“electronic” journals
revenue, 2003
700m
Full text journal article
downloads in 2013 through
Elsevier ScienceDirect
‘‘
of the content, the dissemination
of content. In the past 20 years,
Elsevier has been at the forefront
of technological advances, and we
need to be, because that’s what
researchers and practitioners need:
more useful ways to access, analyse
and search content. If I’m the
steward of anything, it is managing
that combination of tech and
content.”
More than once Mobed
underlines that Elsevier has been
in this game a while—2014 is its
134th anniversary—and with that
history and the company’s scale
there are added obligations.“There
is an expectation that we serve
our customers, engage with the
research community, and give them
what they want, but there is also a
responsibility incumbent on us that
we help pave the way.”
Part of paving the way is the
fact that the development and
dissemination of new technology
has a wide-ranging effect on
the way research is going—the
platforms and search engines that
lead users to the right content—
“but it’s also our expertise; we have
hundreds of former researchers and
practitioners who work for Elsevier.
They didn’t join us for the love of
Elsevier—though I hope they do
now—but because they want to
improve science,”says Mobed.“Yes,
we need to listen to our partners;
we also need to lead.”
In the past 20 years, Elsevier has been at the
forefront of technological advances, and we
need to be, because that’s what researchers
and practitioners need