𝐇𝐞 𝐝𝐮𝐠 𝐭𝐨𝐨 𝐝𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐄𝐥𝐬𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐫'𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐥 𝐟𝐮𝐞𝐥 𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬: "𝐈 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐝"

If you're into science or medicine, you may have heard of journals like Cell or The Lancet. You might also be familiar with their parent company Elsevier / RELX, and their predatory practices: sometimes charging more than 10,000 dollars for publications whose running costs don't reach a tenth of that amount.

What you might not know is that beyond pocketing public research money, Elsevier is also contributing to climate breakdown, pouring millions into tools and journals providing information about areas yet to be exploited for oil and gas extraction, as well as new technologies needed to dig up oil more efficiently in the Arctic and the Canadian tar sands. The motto of one of their online tools, Geofacets, used to be that, thanks to it, “exploration has never been more seamless.”

But that's the tip of the iceberg. For years, RELX's political action committee REPAC has been providing support to climate denialist politicians in the US, preventing carbon mitigation bills from reaching a vote in Congress.

I document this and other complicities of big academic publishers in my new book Science in Resistance, where I interview Kip Lyall, a former employee of the journal Cell, who was fired after asking too many questions about the company's fossil fuel ties.

Excerpt below. 👇

#Science #OpenScience #Fossilfuels #Climate #Climate #Activism #Journal