We recognise that the growth and future of our company is dependent on our ability to deliver information-based analytics and decision tools in a sustainable way to customers. 

Improving customer outcomes

Our goal is to improve outcomes for our customers by providing information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers that benefit their daily work.

Peer Review

To ensure the quality of scientific papers submitted to Elsevier, primary research journals undergo peer review. This means that once received from an author, editors send papers to specialist researchers in the field. In most disciplines, this is done anonymously. In some cases, the process is ‘double blind,’ where both the reviewer and the author are anonymous, to limit bias based on an author’s gender, country of origin, academic status or previous publication history. It may also help ensure that articles written by renowned authors are considered on the content of their papers, rather than reputation.

Elsevier’s Peer Review Workbench (PRW) provides researchers and academics, upon application, access to Elsevier journal manuscript metadata to allow systematic analyses of peer review processes at scale. PRW advances transparency and evidencebased studies in the journal editorial and peer review process.

Elsevier also enables the automatic sharing of peer review metadata with a feed of peer review information from our submission and peer review system Editorial Manager to Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) once the peer review process has been completed. ORCID is a not-for-profit, cross-publisher organisation that fosters trustworthy connections between researchers and their institutions. Researchers receive a unique ID they can connect to their peer review activities across journals and publishers to showcase their reviewing work. Data is supplied directly by participating publishers and cannot be entered manually ensuring reliability.

Editorial standards

Maintaining the integrity of what we publish is vital to the trust of customers and other stakeholders. Our Editorial Policy, available to all staff and publicly available, makes clear our respect for human rights, pluralism of sources, ideas and voices.

2023 PERFORMANCE
Support of SDG 8 by rolling out the RELX Responsible AI Principles across the business areas

As data science and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly applied across RELX to improve customer outcomes and business processes, we created the RELX Responsible AI Principles to guide their use. The Principles were published in 2022 and are publicly available.

The Principles are accompanied by a RELX position paper on AI and a dedicated address that anyone can use to provide feedback or raise queries: [email protected]

The Principles state: We consider the real-world impact of our solutions on people, we take action to prevent the creation or reinforcement of unfair bias, we can explain how our solutions work, we create accountability through human oversight, we respect privacy and champion robust data governance.

The Responsible AI & Data Science (RAIDS) team works to implement the RELX Responsible AI Principles across the company. They are responsible for developing policy, processes, tools, resources and training to support teams working with data science, machine learning and AI in embedding the Principles in their day-to-day activities.

In 2023, we published the RAIDS policy and accountability framework which is integrated into our new Data Science Project Review governance process and supported the business with rollout and adoption. The purpose of the policy is to support colleagues in implementing the RELX Responsible AI Principles in their business area, drawing on best practice from within our business and other organisations.

Four primary RAIDS Champions, embedded across the company, provide ad-hoc training and support in priority areas, particularly around generative AI projects, as well as a wider network of more than 85 colleagues working on integration of the Principles in products and workflows. In 2023, they collectively supported more than 30 projects, held tailored workshops and training sessions and published a suite of self-service resources and training videos. Feedback from the workshops will inform a review and update to the Principles in 2024, reflecting the speed and scale at which AI is evolving.

 

Digital knowledge and innovation: advancing customer goals

Across RELX, we work to address customer challenges through digital innovation. In 2023, electronic products and services accounted for 83% of revenue, up from 30% in 2003.

Risk

ICIS, part of Risk, is a global provider of chemical and energy marketing intelligence. In 2023, ICIS launched the first Pyrolysis Oil Pricing Indices to address increasing consumer demand for the pricing of chemical recycling outputs. The new price series sits alongside ICIS’ comprehensive coverage of key recycling chains.

Supplier Carbon Footprints, which harnesses ICIS’ understanding of chemical markets combined with carbon footprint data from lifecycle data providers Carbon Minds, enables companies to identify, measure, and manage opportunities to reduce global supply chain emissions for chemicals and plastics, with ground-breaking GHG emission data by supplier, region and plant. For many businesses, Scope 3 emissions in particular account for most of the overall carbon footprint of a company. ICIS customers are now able to report emissions and identify areas of focus, empowering customers to make supply chain decisions that could significantly reduce their Scope 3 emissions.

Scientific, Technical & Medical

Elsevier announced Scopus AI in 2023 which provides summaries and relevant references in response to natural language questions about research topics. Scopus AI combines generative artificial intelligence with Scopus’ trusted content and data to help researchers gain deeper insights faster, facilitate collaboration, and increase the societal impact of research. Scopus AI provides summaries based on abstracts, allows navigation for extended exploration, and cites sources. Elsevier ensures that the content used in Scopus AI is rigorously vetted, based on over 29,000 academic journals from more than 7,000 publishers worldwide.

Elsevier announced an early access launch of ClinicalKey AI in the year, which helps physicians access accurate evidence-based information at the point of care, by combining Elsevier’s large corpus of trusted medical information with advanced AI technology. It features conversational search to accelerate access to evidence-based clinical information and adheres to industry data privacy and security standards and the RELX Responsible AI principles.

Also in 2023, Elsevier launched EmBiology, an AI-driven research tool that provides visualisations of biological relationships, giving researchers a rapid understanding of disease biology and allowing them to focus on critical evidence. Researchers working in drug discovery and development are able to intuitively explore biological relationships and concepts to improve drug target and biomarker identification and prioritisation, enabling more confident decision making about what targets to pursue.

Legal

Legal introduced Lexis+ AI in 2023, a generative AI product designed to streamline legal research and drafting. The new platform delivers trusted results in an easy-to-use interface with hallucination-free, linked legal citations, combining AI technology with proprietary LexisNexis search technology. It features conversational search, intelligent legal drafting, insightful summarisation and document upload capabilities, all supported by encryption and privacy technology to keep sensitive data secure.

In 2023, Legal launched InterAction+, a cloud based legal CRM solution to help lawyers manage relationships and identify opportunities and at-risk clients. With exclusive content from LexisNexis Legal and Professional, US customers can view litigation events by firm, practice area and jurisdictions of clients and prospects.

Exhibitions

Digital event technology continued to transform the way RX’s customers connect and do business by enabling them to create and capture more value. Emperia is RX’s badge scanning mobile app that enables exhibitors to capture and qualify leads. In 2023 60% of exhibitors used Emperia at events where it was available and at RX’s ISC West and Interphex 2023 shows adoption rates reached 100%.

RX collects and uses behavioural data to help its customers make better decisions. It’s Exhibitor Dashboard brings together event data and insights in real time, allowing customers to analyse their results, improve their event performance and justify financial investment. In 2023, the dashboard was made available to over 29,000 exhibitors at 104 RX events, of which 33% used the tool.

Responding to customer needs

Listening to our customers allows us to deepen our understanding of their needs and drive improvements. We do this through regular surveys, customer dashboards and feedback mechanisms. With input from customer insight teams across our company, we calculated a RELX-wide customer satisfaction metric showing that in 2023, 86% of customers would recommend working with RELX.

Access to information

In primary research we offer two separate payment models for our science and medical journals to suit author preferences: pay-to-read articles funded by payments for reading made by individuals or institutions; and pay-to-publish (commonly known as open access) funded by payments for publishing made by authors, their institutions or funding bodies, with the research freely available to read by all upon publication. We offer a range of pay-to-read and pay-to-publish options, both subscriptionbased and transactional. Nearly all of Elsevier’s 2,900 journals enable open access publishing. We welcome debate in government, academic and library communities regarding the mechanisms by which scientific outputs should be openly available and continue to create new access options together with industry partners.

During 2023, Elsevier announced a geographical pricing pilot to support authors in low- and middle-income countries with equitable open access publishing options. The pilot will run across 143 of Elsevier’s Gold Open Access journals and tailor pricing structures according to Gross National Income per capita. The model aims to reduce financial barriers that hinder researchers and institutions from low- and middle-income countries from publishing research in Gold Open Access Journals. Elsevier continues to waive article publishing charges for authors in the lowest economic band.

Elsevier is a partner of Clearinghouse for Open Research (CHORUS) which enables public access to funded research. CHORUS utilises publishers’ existing infrastructure for discoverability, search, archiving and preservation of scientific and medical research articles, and it is now integrated into the ScienceDirect platform. Furthermore, members of the public can read Elsevier’s peer-reviewed content through walk-in access at public and academic libraries around the world. Our ScienceDirect platform is available to the public through onsite user access from any participating university library or UK public library via the Access to Research programme.

Providing access in countries with low resources is a priority for us. Through Research4Life, more than 11,500 institutions in over 125 low- and middle-income countries receive affordable access to over 200,000 peer-reviewed resources. Elsevier is a founding partner, providing around 21% of the content in Research4Life, as well as access to our abstract and citation database Scopus. Elsevier offers free media access to over 2,000 journalists through our newsroom. In addition, Patient Access provides patients and caregivers with access to individual papers related to medicine and healthcare at no cost, upon request, within 24 hours.

Elsevier publishes a suite of nine journals, called Research Elements, which focus on research methods, data and equipment. Openly sharing and describing the methodologies and data generated by experiments improves the reproducibility of published research. Researchers who have published in these journals note benefits such as reaching new readers, sharing innovative technologies and making research more accessible.

2023 PERFORMANCE
Support of SDG 17 by strengthening Corporate Responsibility and Sales team engagement

 In 2023, we developed materials to help sales teams build awareness of our CR priorities with their customers. This included an animated video highlighting how RELX products and services impact society and contribute to advancing the SDGs. The video was featured at the RELX global senior management conference and a longer version will be part of RELX onboarding materials and a new toolkit launching in 2024.

We presented our Annual RELX SDG Customer Awards during the RELX SDG Inspiration Day. These included Neste, nominated by ICIS and Proagrica, part of LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Neste is pioneering more sustainable aviation fuel and has committed to supporting customers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 million tonnes of CO2e annually by 2030. Solvay, a global leader in materials, chemicals and solutions, was nominated by Elsevier for its One Planet roadmap covering three categories; climate, resources and better life, with ten measurable commitments where the company has the biggest positive impact. Panasonic, nominated by LexisNexis Legal & Professional, aims to reduce CO2 emissions by more than 300 million tonnes, or about 1% of the current total global emissions, by 2050. RX nominated Silverback Films, using the power of film-making and story-telling to reveal the urgent truth of our changing planet to a global audience.

We published visual stories for internal and external audiences to mark the SDG midway point and included a summary of tools and reports from across RELX that advance the SDGs such as LexisNexis Legal and Professional’s Exploring the Global Sustainable Innovation Landscape: The Top 100 Companies and Beyond Report, Elsevier’s Biodiversity Research in the Netherlands and Worldwide Report, and The RX Sustainability Playbook.

Customers are increasingly engaged in corporate responsibility matters and to address this increased interest the CR team supports sales teams in responding to customer surveys and requests for information. Such requests have increased by more than 300% since 2021.

Bringing science into society

We work closely with journalists to ensure that research findings are accurately and effectively communicated to the public, and that authors receive credit for their work. A number of journalists receive free access to all Elsevier publications via Elsevier’s Media Access programme.

Researchers who published an outstanding peer-reviewed article that has significantly impacted people’s lives around the world, or has the potential to do so, are recognised with the Elsevier Atlas Award. The articles are made freely available and translated into everyday language, while author interviews are made public to encourage the dissemination or implementation of their findings. Content is linked to the SDGs and is featured on the RELX SDG Resource Centre.

We provide essential resources in times of emergency, making full text articles free to access for healthcare professionals, researchers, librarians and members of the public affected by disasters. While the World Health Organisation has now ended the Public Health Emergency of International Concern categorisation for Covid-19 and Mpox, all related content published through July 2023 will remain freely available, encompassing early-stage and peer-reviewed research, as well as evidence-based clinical overviews, patient education and drug monographs.

In 2023, Elsevier continued to offer free resources to Ukrainian researchers via a Ukrainian Academic Support page online where researchers can access waived and reduced author publishing charges for open access journals. They also have access to publishing resources on Researcher Academy, which provides researchers free e-learning modules developed by global experts and career advice. They can also register for free access to ScienceDirect, Scopus and SciVal as well as clinical resources such as ClinicalKey, Complete Anatomy and Osmosis. To support Ukrainian journal editors and authors, we worked with the Polish Academy and the Ukrainian Council of Young Scientists to deliver two workshop series, one for editors and another for authors.

The Lancet celebrated its bicentennial in the year with a commitment to ensuring that medicine improves lives and that knowledge transforms society for the better. The Lancet affirmed its five key priorities – universal health coverage, mental health: climate health, health research, and child and adolescent health; emphasising collaboration with the medical community to advance healthcare and increase the social impact of science.

Elsevier’s Library Connect programme, with a website, newsletter, events, social media offerings, as well as a new Library Connect Academy, provides library and information science professionals worldwide with opportunities for knowledge sharing. As of 2023, there were 60,000 Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals globally subscribed to the Library Connect Newsletter, a complimentary publication, covering LIS best practices, trends and technology.

During 2023, the Library Connect website, containing articles, infographics, videos and other resources, received approximately 30,000 visitors. The Library Connect website is currently ranked sixth in the top 90 librarian blogs and websites for librarians by Feedspot, a content aggregator for blogs and websites.

 

Accessibility

We strive to empower all people, including persons with disabilities, by ensuring our products and services are accessible and easy to use by everyone. Our commitment to accessibility is embedded across RELX and advances our Inclusion Policy. We follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1 level AA).

We maintain an Accessibility Policy that highlights industry standards and tools to embed accessibility into our products and our business operations. We apply best practice from the RELX Accessibility Policy across hundreds of digital products and websites. Our Accessibility Policy is available at www.relx.com/cr-downloads.

Risk employees continued enhancing our A11yCAT tool to help developers address accessibility bugs in real time while edition 2.0 was successfully beta tested in the year for release in 2024. It will highlight code to help developers discover errors.

Elsevier empowers all learners by providing features such as full-text search, marked tables, magnifiable content, screen reader compatibility and high-contrast text. Its Health Education Systems Incorporated (HESI) Delivery Operations team continued to work with HESI testing candidates that register to take a HESI exam remotely via our remote proctoring vendors. Since 2019, the team has processed more than 800 candidate accommodation requests, ensuring that these candidates have an accessible and inclusive experience.

In 2023, members of the Accessibility Working Group logged over 275 accessibility projects and Elsevier’s Global Books Digital Archive fulfilled more than 3,200 disability requests, 91% of them through AccessText.org, a service we helped establish. In 2023, Elsevier was designated a Global Certified Accessible publisher by Benetech, a non-profit organisation based in Palo Alto, California. The certification recognises publishers that meet specific accessibility criteria to support readers with disabilities and learning differences. Relevant file testing received 100% scores in all categories.

In 2023, Elsevier’s ScienceDirect achieved zero errors on its homepage with the WAVE accessibility testing tool, making the research platform number one of the top 1m websites ranked in the 2023 WebAIM Million accessibility report.

In 2023, Elsevier signed the UK Publishers Association Accessibility Action Group Accessible Publishing Charter and also worked closely with university disability services offices, launching a survey and interviews to understand how to better serve students with disabilities. In the sixth year of Elsevier’s Accessibility Belting programme, 85 additional colleagues received belts (more than 340 people have completed the programme since inception). Additionally, the Elsevier Digital Accessibility Team provided awareness trainings for new hires as part of onboarding. They also conducted research into automated text descriptions and sonification to help users with disabilities better understand trends in data, holding six sessions with visually impaired people to better understand how to develop useful text descriptions for speech technologies.

We worked with disability services offices, procurement officials and instructors across the world to provide Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) and Accessibility Conformance Reports. Customers can also utilise the [email protected] Inbox to connect with an accessibility expert and make VPAT and report requests. In 2023, Risk completed 26 VPATs; Legal’s Accessibility UX team resolved over 100 customer enquiries and generated VPATs for 30 products.

We promoted accessibility to outside companies and vendors throughout the year. RELX accessibility teams partnered with external content providers, including Highcharts, to advance accessible solutions for public benefit. Elsevier has collaborated with Highcharts for over eight years to continually improve the accessibility of its widely used chart library.

2023 PERFORMANCE
Support of SDG 10 by expanding the Accessibility Champions model across RELX

RELX is committed to creating products that are usable by everyone including people who experience some type of disability. A network of Accessibility Champions advance the RELX Accessibility Policy and encourage teams to incorporate accessibility requirements from the start and to use best practices to ensure an optimal experience for disabled users. The RELX Accessibility Leadership Advisory Board convened during the year to address challenges and approaches to accessibility.

We expanded the accessibility training model across the four business areas during the year. We also released an Introduction to Accessibility video accompanied by a quick start guide for product managers, ensuring accessibility requirements are embedded in our products.

In 2023, we celebrated the fifth annual RELX Accessibility Leadership Awards, introducing a new award category for team leadership. Winners received a glass award with a braille inscription and featured in an all-employee news article.

We also made a donation to the charity of their choice. Nominees were honoured for product enhancements to key products which led to the two highest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) compliance scores in Elsevier history and for improving accessibility for internal colleagues. 

 

2024 objectives
  • Customer engagement – SDG 17 (Partnership for the Goals): Create internal Sustainability Hub to support customer enquiries and engagement
  • Quality – SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth): Update RELX Responsible AI Principles to keep pace with evolving technology
  • Accessibility – SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities): Develop accessibility specialist career track for RELX employees
By 2030

Continue to expand customer base across our four business areas through excellence in products and services, active listening and engagement, editorial and quality standards, and accessibility; a recognised advocate for responsible marketplace practices

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