Category: elsevier

Guardian news 30/5/08:

Reed Elsevier has finally stopped organising arms trade fairs – five months later than it promised shareholders and staff….Yesterday the company said it had sold the DSEi, ITEC and LAAD defence exhibitions to Britain’s largest independent exhibitions group, Clarion Events, for an undisclosed sum…”The events we have acquired in the defence-and-security sector are a valuable and profitable addition to our portfolio and fit perfectly with our strategy for international expansion,” said Clarion Events’ chief executive, Simon Kimble.

Story at defensenews.com

Clarion seems to run trade shows for the gambling, petrochemical, biofuel and gas industries, as well as the NEC baby show…

Dutch institutional investors and company executives are pressing for more rules to govern activist shareholders, news agency Reuters reports.
…
‘We have all seen that investors with a short term horizon and a strategy of shareholder activism try to make life miserable for companies,’ Jan Hommen, chairman of publishing group Reed Elsevier, was quoted as saying. ‘They have no loyalty at all to the company or other stakeholders.’

dutchnews.nl, 9 May 2008

Reed Elsevier, the publisher and exhibitions group, will be challenged tomorrow by Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) at its annual general meeting over its failure to sell its controversial defence exhibitions business….However, sources insisted that a sale was a matter of weeks away, with private equity-owned Clarion Events, the organiser of The Baby Show and the London International Horse Show at Olympia, the preferred bidder.

Full article in yesterday’s Times: link

Times Online december 30th 2007:

THE professional publisher Reed Elsevier has failed to sell off its controversial arms fairs by the end of this year as planned.

The tiny but highly profitable division was put up for sale in June after key customers and authors took offence at Reed’s involvement in shows such as DSEi (Defence Systems & Equipment International), London’s main arms fair, where some exhibitors were ejected this year for trying to promote leg irons.

Sir Crispin Davis, Reed’s chief executive, was criticised at last year’s annual meeting by antiwar campaigners. F&C Asset Management and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust also sold their shares in the company in protest.

Bids for the division, which includes the Abu Dhabi Idex fair, came in at close to £30m, but failed to progress. The sale is being handled by Price Waterhouse Coopers.

Reed said recently that there was “very active interest” in the portfolio.

This tit-bit from the Observer on sunday

n June, Reed agreed to sell the business. DSEI generates around £25m for the publishing giant and is thought to be worth double that. Four organisations have expressed strong interest in the business, though neither their identities nor nationalities are known.

DSEi starts tomorrow (tuesday)

Elsevier quit organising defense exhibitions, that much is sure. But was it due to boycott (ScienceBlogs) or shareholder revolt (The Independent)? As far as I was aware, neither of those factors was involved directly, but how can I be sure? Symon Hill gives his low-down on it at the Guardian Comment Is Free blog.

“Reed Elsevier announced today that it is to exit the defence exhibitions sector. This portfolio of five shows is part of Reed Elsevier’s global Business division and represents around 0.5% of group annual turnover. ”

http://www.reed-elsevier.com/

aka. We won!

Update Reed press release

Reed Elsevier CEO Crispin Davis:

“Our defence shows are quality businesses which have performed well in recent years. Nonetheless, it has become increasingly clear that growing numbers of important customers and authors have very real concerns about our involvement in the defence exhibitions business.

“We have listened closely to these concerns and this has led us to conclude that the defence shows are no longer compatible with Reed Elsevier’s position as a leading publisher of scientific, medical, legal and business content.”

Update 2: Lancet editorial on this

Update 3: Coverage in the Times and the Guardian

An open letter to Elsevier and all those involved in the IEHG from geographer Keith Halfacree, 10 April 2007:

I am respectfully informing you of my decision to follow my fellow human geography academics at Newcastle University and elsewhere and am suspending work on my three contributions to Elsevier’s International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography. This is in protest at Reed Elsevier’s ongoing role as organiser of weapons fairs such as the Defence Systems & Equipment International (DSEI) exhibitions in London.

This has been a difficult decision for me to make as it pits the total repugnance with which I view the arms industry against a strong personal ethic of staying true to commitments I make to others. However, having been wrestling with these issues for quite some time now, and I especially thank Dave (Featherstone) and Paul (Routledge) for this, I feel that there is only one course I can take now that a greater formalisation of our protest has emerged and has been discussed most thoughtfully across the Critical Geography Forum.

I would like to add, though, that I have found past dealings with Elsevier themselves via seeking reprint permissions, dealing with the mechanics of publishing journal articles, etc. to be excellent and supportive of the promotion of knowledge. Thus, again following the Newcastle lead, my action initially only targets the high-profile IEHG and I shall not be boycotting contributions towards other Elsevier publications. However, I do of course reserve the right to revisit this decision.

Again lifting often directly from the Newcastle statement, in greater detail, I do not wish my labour to contribute to the profits of an industry that is not regulated and policed sufficiently to prevent sales of weapons to known abusers of human rights. Reports on the 2005 DSEI fair highlighted serious shortcomings of this nature – see also the excellent Mark Thomas’s (2006) As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela (Ebury). More generally, echoing calls in Elsevier journals such as The Lancet, The British Medical Journal, and Political Geography, as a critical scholar committed to a culture of life I have profound concerns about the incorporation of my labour into an enterprise that profits from the production of the means of killing. Okay, so I am a small small cog and with politics like mine my labour is compromised everyday (!) but just sometimes one has to ‘scream’ (John Holloway 2002 Change the World without taking Power, Pluto) ‘enough’! After all, doesn’t ‘every little count’ (sic.)…

Finally, as those of you know me will appreciate, I find this kind of public statement attention seeking and hence embarrassing, but I do it as part of the call on colleagues elsewhere to join the boycott, and to urge those working in an editorial capacity on the IEHG to reconsider their involvement.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Keith Halfacree (Geography, Swansea University)

Reed Elsevier’s AGM in London on Tuesday was dominated by questions over their involvement in the international arms and torture trade. The protest outside the AGM and questions within were accompanied by newspaper reports of the discovery of the promotion of landmine sales at one recent Reed Elsevier arms fair, and reports that delegates from Iran, which is subject to a UN ban on arms exports, were invited to another Elsevier arms fair which is currently happening in Brazil

Report on the protest, from the Independent

Report on the protest from Indymedia

Pictures here (Flickr) and here (CAATblog)

Reed Elsevier are mostly a publishing company, but they also own Reed Exhibitions. Reed Exhibitions put on trade fairs and the like, including arms fairs around the world where the rampantly uncontrolled arms industry arranges to sell guns, bombs, torture equipment and delivery vehicles to those who will use them on people around the world who need to be gunned, bombed and tortured.

There’s a list of Reed Elsevier’s upcoming trade fairs here. You can see the famous DSEi (‘The World’s Most Prestigious Defence Exhibition’) in London, this September, at the same time as the Cannes International Boat Show in France. More immediately, the Latin America Aero & Defence – LAAD 07 – is happening in Rio De Janeiro 17 April 2007 – 20 April 2007, at the same time as The Lancet Asia Medical Forum 2007 in Singapore. I wonder how the Linux and Comic communities (New York Comic Con, February 2008; LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in Sao Paulo, May 2007) feel about Reed Elsevier’s involvement with the arms and torture industries?

In 3 pages of letters in today’s Lancet the medical community slammed Elsevier for its involvement in the arms and torture industry. Letters from the Royal College of Physicians, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Doctors for Human Rights, People’s Health Movement, Medsin, Doctors for Iraq said that there is a basic contradiction betwen Reed Elsevier’s commercial interest in death and torture and the values of the Lancet, and medical publishing in general.

The Guardian: Doctors attack Lancet owner’s arms fair links

Across three pages of today’s edition the medical journal publishes letters from top doctors, led by the Royal College of Physicians, who say that Reed Elsevier’s commercial interest in the arms trade undermines the journal’s efforts to improve health worldwide.

The editors of the journal also call on their proprietor to drop its work with the defence industry, claiming that the association is damaging The Lancet’s reputation. The Lancet’s international advisory board is now considering an “organised campaign” against its own publisher.

via ScienceDirect, Lancet table of contents

From the reply by the Lancet editors:

On the question of arms exhibitions, we have found that a growing number of our Elsevier colleagues, who have long standing relationships with scientifi c societies and authors, are questioning Reed Elsevier’s decision to continue in this business. At a time of fi erce debate over author-pays open access journals and open archiving, Reed Elsevier, many of them say, needs to be making strong alliances, not creating new enemies.

Update: PDF of letters and editors response here

In an editorial from the 17 march, ‘Scientific communities must work together to prevent the sale of arms’:

The scientific and health communities with which Reed Elsevier is linked in a symbiotic relationship have a clear opportunity to exert their influence. As a group, these communities have the power to influence corporate strategy. They must sign petitions such as the one identified here, the societies for which Reed Elsevier publishes journals must look for alternative publishers, and editors of journals must express their disgust at the company’s arms trade activities through collectives such as the World Association of Medical Editors (http://www.wame.org/). Furthermore, academic and industry funded researchers should now agree not to submit their high profile randomised control trials to Reed Elsevier journals until links with the arms trade are ended. They should make these decisions public, thus ending their tacit support for the company’s links with the arms trade. Direct loss of revenue in this way would quickly identify to Reed Elsevier that the scientific world will no longer tolerate its warmongering and health damaging business activities.

British medical journal has an extended debate on the ethics of Reed Elsevier’s involvement in the arms trade, here.

Over 1000 people have now signed the petition asking Reed Elsevier and subsidaries to stop organising arms fairs! Hurrah! I don’t know where the sudden surge in activity has come from (over 100 in the last two days), but well done to all those who are passing the message on.

Update: Suddenly the reason for all the activity is clear

Our open letter (full text, including list of signatories) has been published in the Times Higher Education Supplement. You can see exactly what it looked like here.

In other news, the online petition – which is still open – is getting closer to 1000 signatories. Noam Chomsky (petition signatory 870) recently joined the international list of those against Reed Elsevier’s involvement in the arms and torture industry – academics, medics, publishers and students from five continents. If you know someone who works at the Antarctic Survey please ask them to sign so we can make it six!

Reed Elsevier, the publisher of The Lancet, has today been condemned by a former editor of the British Medical Journal for its involvement in the promotion of arms sales.

Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Richard Smith urges scientists and academics to publish their research and findings elsewhere.

Full story here

Original article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine: ‘Reed-Elsevier’s hypocrisy in selling arms and health’

From PR

www.idiolect.org.uk/elsevier/ is now live:

“Reed Elsevier is a publishing company with an arms trade problem. While the bulk of their business is in scientific, medical and educational publishing, they also organise arms fairs around the world. The aim of this website is to mobilise the academic community that writes and reads Reed Elsevier’s journals to persuade them to stop organising arms fairs.”

More details and petition here: http://www.idiolect.org.uk/elsevier/petition.php

Please pass the message on to academics, researchers and postgraduates

BBC News story: Authors make book fair protest

Authors including Will Self and Ian McEwan have protested against the organisers of the London Book Fair being involved in the arms trade.
In a letter published in The Times Literary Supplement, the writers called for Reed Exhibitions to stop holding arms fairs around the world.
…
We are appalled that our trade should be commercially connected to one which exacerbates insecurity and repression, and which props up regimes inimical to free expression,” stated the letter.

1. Australian Librarians organising against Reed Elsevier’s involvement in the arms trade
2. I’ve created a new category on this blog for Elsevier stuff: here
3. Text of CAAT’s letter to the lancet (with hyperlinks)
4. Press release about the same