As if I didn’t need another reason to hate academic publishing giant Elsevier (other than their horrid price-gouging that is), apparently they are also complicit in arms-dealing. My first reaction was “WTF?” but apparently it’s true.

Imagine you are an academic who works their ass off on some research and submits it gratis for publication in an Elsevier journal. Elsevier turns around and puts an absurd markup on the journal, bundles it with a bunch of other journals that nobody really wants to read, and offers it to your school’s library. The library is faced with having a lousy periodical collection or a lousy book collection and ends up cutting back acquisitions. Meanwhile, Elsevier takes the profits and uses them to run an arms fair so that repressive regimes can buy clusterbombs to kill babies. How might that make you feel?