From Galileo to Tech hubs

When many of us hear the word ‘salt’, we mentally add ‘pepper’. The word ‘fish’? We add ‘chips’. When I say ‘the Netherlands’ to Jan bij de Weg, he hardly misses a beat: “publishing”.

For Jan bij de Weg, global general counsel for Elsevier, RELX’s Scientific, Technical & Medical business, the two are a natural fit. “We’ve always been a very liberal society in the Netherlands and that fosters communication and freedom of expression. It’s really no surprise that publishing has flourished here.”

It was that passion for freedom of expression that led the House of Elzevier to defy the Vatican and publish Galileo’s Two New Sciences in 1638. Although Elzevier closed its doors in 1712, Jacobus Robbers adopted the famous brand name and printer’s mark for his newly-launched Elsevier publishing business in 1880. And it wasn’t long before the company too was championing the oppressed, publishing the work of Jewish-German scientists in World War Two.

Fast forward to the late 1960s, and while miniskirts took the UK fashion world by storm, over in the Netherlands, Elsevier was quietly spearheading a revolution of its own; one that would forever change the face of publishing.

By 1971, Elsevier launched ADONIS, the first database of journal articles. In 1991, in conjunction with nine American universities, Elsevier embarked on the digitisation of its journal publishing business via The University Licensing Project (TULIP) – an aptly chosen name and an affectionate nod to its Dutch origins. The TULIP project was the largest of its kind at the time in electronic journal distribution and forms the basis for ScienceDirect, launched six years later and now the world's largest platform of peer-reviewed literature. Bij de Weg recalls: “That was such an important move for us. It gave us the ability to add analytics, enrich content and apply search functionality.” He laughs: “Although compared to what we can do today, those first electronic files were pretty flat.”

Bij de Weg joined the company in 1997, attracted by the promise of real purpose. Supported by an ever-growing team of legal colleagues, he oversaw a series of acquisitions, including the research management platform Mendeley and institutional repository provider bepress; each designed to support Elsevier’s evolution from a print business to a global information analytics business specialising in science and health.

Today, Elsevier publishes over 2,650 digital journals, including The Lancet and Cell, 42,000 e-books and many iconic reference works, including Gray’s Anatomy. In 2020, it published more than 560,000 articles – 90 percent more than a decade ago – and researchers read a total of 1.3bn articles a year.  These days, that content also populates digital solutions and tools in the areas of strategic research management, R&D performance, clinical decision support and professional education; alongside ScienceDirect and Scopus, there’s SciVal, ClinicalKey and Sherpath, to name but a few. The company uses deep learning to help its customers sift through and draw insights from this vast corpus of data.

To encourage collaboration, innovation and a disruptive start-up mindset among its 2,500 technologists worldwide, Elsevier boasts three tech hubs globally, with one based in Amsterdam. Alexander Witteveen, a self-confessed nerd “and proud of it” was brought in as vice president of technology excellence & engineering to develop, launch and be head of house of the tech hub in Amsterdam nearly three years ago.

In 2018, there were just over 20 technologists working in Amsterdam. By the time Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte officially opened the tech hub in February 2019, it had increased its size to around 90 technologists. Today, the hub is 190-strong with engineering talent from as far afield as Brazil, Russia, Turkey and the USA among others. Using the latest developments in software engineering and artificial technologies such as natural language processing and machine learning, they help solve customers' biggest challenges.

Witteveen explains: “We are on a journey to pivot from products to an inter-connected platform where technology enables us to share and connect data at a scale that has never been done before. It allows us to evolve our product proposition from segmented static information to real-time recommendation and decision support. Having access to a vast amount of data, it is our job to help transform this data into a machine-readable format. We ensure the data is optimised for rapid consistent processing, enrich the data with context data, and link this to predictive analytics. In the end, this generates insights that help our customers make better decisions.”

For example, in Elsevier’s abstract and citation database Scopus, the team optimised the matching algorithm for queries, so it returns more and more relevant results. The enhancement has already been rolled out to ScienceDirect, a great example of the hubs’ raison d'être.

The goal of Witteveen and his counterparts is to create a series of common building blocks - “sort of Lego bricks” - in a shared platform so all current and future products can contribute and draw on them. “A great example is our User Privacy Centre, which offers all our users a service to manage privacy data. Everyone is able to leverage the same piece of technology”. Also on the roadmap is an increase in predictive analytics. “For example, doctors will not only be able to look at your symptoms and history, but call on the case histories of patients similar to you and use that information in their decision-making process. Exciting times.”

For Laura Hassink and her team, the benefits of the hub are already tangible. In her current role as senior vice president of publishing transformation for Elsevier’s journals division, she aims to solve the pain points she has witnessed researchers tussle with during her 23 years with the company. Originally, she turned to outside vendors for support; now she can rely on the internal development squads to develop solutions for customers. “A great example is finding researchers for the more than 2.5m submitted papers annually. It’s always been a big challenge for our journal editors. Now, we have a smart reviewer recommender based on machine learning and data science. It not only gives editors the name and contact details of a potential reviewer who is not in their immediate network, but also a reviewer's publication history and current reviewing commitments.”

Hassink has also drawn on data science to support journals overwhelmed by pandemic-related submissions this year. “We are able to flag Covid-19-related manuscripts to editors. The paper still undergoes the same peer review, but it helps us get it out there as soon as possible.”

For Sjoerd Cooijmans, recalling his first week with RELX in 2001 conjures up a heady kaleidoscope of emotions, none more vivid than the horror of watching the planes crashing into New York’s Twin Towers on 9/11. The next few years saw him traveling to London to work with the medical journal The Lancet, before hopping on a plane to head up human resources in New York. Last year, he returned home to the Netherlands with a wife and “two little Americans” by his side to take on a newly-minted role as head of human resources for the Dutch arm of RELX and global research markets.

He explains: “Traditionally, human resources in RELX has been split by business unit, but the Netherlands is the first RELX office to try a country approach. It’s already proved hugely beneficial. When Covid-19 arrived, we were able to hit the ground running, developing a country-wide strategy aligned with Dutch government guidelines.”

Importantly, the country approach allows Cooijmans and his team to take a helicopter view of the various RELX companies occupying Amsterdam’s Millennium Tower. There are three RELX businesses located there today – Elsevier, with its scientific, technical and medical focus, has 1,100 employees. Legal and Risk employ another 300 people between them.

Over the past two decades, RELX has radically transformed its business model, transitioning from print magazines, newspapers and journals to digital offerings and information-based analytics and decision tools. By 2020, print publishing was responsible for just 8 percent of revenues, a figure that continues to contract each year. But back in 2000, it was quite a different story. In total, 64 percent of RELX revenues were in print and it was clear that with only 35 percent of its 300 trade titles online, Reed Business Information (RBI) was increasingly falling out of step with the wider business.

Laura Hassink, a 20-year RELX and Elsevier veteran, remembers the period well: “Unlike other RELX businesses, RBI relied heavily on advertising revenue and that’s a notoriously volatile revenue stream, particularly in a post-Google world.” The evidence of that volatility was there to see in RBI’s 2009 numbers with an -18 percent decline in revenues and -40 percent decline in profit.

Over the next few years, some RBI titles were reimagined as online solutions, while others were sold. As 2016 dawned, the decision was taken to sell a majority stake in RBI’s Dutch-language weekly news magazine Elsevier Weekblad. Hassink admits: “Logically, it probably should have gone earlier – it was a very different value proposition to the rest of the business. But it’s hard to part with something bearing your company’s name.” Among the last magazines to go were a suite of farming titles, including the Dutch-language Boerderij.

RELX’s transition has been rewarded with healthy revenue growth across all business units globally and share prices have rocketed; on the Euronext Amsterdam stock exchange, they have more than tripled over the past 10 years. But with the shift in business focus came a pressing need to recruit employees who could deliver the new vision, from data architects to software developers and experts in AI. As Cooijmans notes: “We are now competing with the big companies – Booking.com, Google. That’s not quite the same as recruiting for Sheep magazine.” For Cooijmans and his colleagues it’s meant a major rethink in how they source, reward and retain employees. And that’s where the country approach really comes into its own. Cooijmans explains: “We originally had separate recruiters for each RELX business but now we work as a single team and approach the market as one.”

Thanks to strong relationships with the Dutch institutions and the City of Amsterdam, candidates for the ever-growing number of technology positions are world-class. “The quality of the university education here is excellent,” says Cooijmans. “And we’ve got a lot going for us as an employer. Our open-plan work environment has areas where people can collaborate, or just play ping pong. And we are super international; up to 40 percent of our employees were born outside the Netherlands.” But, according to Cooijmans, RELX’s real competitive edge is “that we don’t sell beer, sausages or hotel rooms. It sounds very simple, but the millennials we recruit want a job where they can make a meaningful contribution.” He adds: “I’ve always been proud to work for RELX but the Covid-19 situation has made that even clearer – The Lancet published the first Oxford vaccine trial paper. A Cell publication was cited in the US Congress. Our online Covid-19 hub provides free access to all pandemic-related research. To give an idea of scale, that saw 200m downloads in 2020. These are things that change the world.”  In fact, since the pandemic, RELX in the Netherlands has seen its employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) rise by double digit points.

For Juliette Goetzee, the key to RELX’s success is the magic triangle. “Content, subject expertise and technology – it’s a pattern you see repeated across all the businesses.” At the time we speak, Goetzee, who has 15 years with RELX under her belt, is just a few months into a new role as managing director of Nextens, partner for tax professionals, part of RELX’s LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Her days have passed in a blur of Microsoft Team meetings with the company’s 150 employees; due to Covid-19 regulations, she is unlikely to meet them face to face for weeks, if not months to come. Whatever their role; customer service or sales and marketing, her message is the same: “What we are doing at Nextens is a perfect fit with other RELX companies. We may all serve different markets, but we are striving for the same goal; to make our customers’ lives easier – that’s not a bad reason to get up in the morning.”

In Nextens case, that has involved treading a path familiar to other businesses in RELX. “We used to physically publish a huge amount of content in book form; essentially an enormous ‘tax almanac’ containing articles and relevant legislative information. That content base moved online to become FiscaalTotaal – a kind of ScienceDirect for the tax world, but with a layer of tools, including checklists, calculation software and template contracts.”

According to Goetzee, this drive to add value has seen Nextens become the market leader in a competitive Dutch marketplace: “Around 40 percent of company taxes in the Netherlands are filed using our software and 25 percent of VAT returns.”

It’s an ambition shared by Manon van der Velde, vice president of product for Nexis Solutions at LexisNexis Legal & Professional, the legal division of RELX.  The solutions she manages include Nexis Uni, a research tool for university students “which we built from scratch, after crowdsourcing ideas from the student community. It’s the first student-centric product inspired by students, and we continue to be inspired by them. For me, it’s the embodiment of customer centricity. Right now, 95 percent of universities in the Netherlands use it.”

For van der Velde, “LexisNexis is a beautiful example of where technology creates insights out of content. We are a translator in a way. We apply intelligence on top of an incredible amount of data and deliver information to help our customers make decisions. Our overall mission at Legal & Professional is to advance the rule of law – it’s a part of our DNA – and making information accessible is a critical part of that. It’s an extremely powerful value proposition.”