There is little doubt that if there is any one person serving in the United States Senate who can be identified as anti-science, it is Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe. He's called global warming a "hoax", tried to pass a novelist off as a climate-change expert at a Senate hearing, and referred to the work of the IPCC as a "corruption of science". He had Senate committee staffers issue a press release blasting Tom Brokaw's objectivity on the climate change issue. We're talking about a sitting Senator who has been such a consistent and vocal opponent of science that the president of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science once referred to him - in an editorial in the journal Science - as a "conspiracy theorist".
Reed Elsevier is one of the leading - if not the leading - publishers of scientific journals. They make profits on the scale of thousands of dollars a minute selling these journals to libraries so that scientists can read them. They have, I'd suggest, some motivation to keep from pissing scientists off any more than necessary.
Which is why I was almost surprised to discover that Reed Elsevier Inc. gave Senator Inhofe $16,500 in 2008, with $3,000 of that coming right from their own Political Action Committee. It's nice to know that Reed Elsevier is always ready to stand behind scientists. With a knife in their hand.
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Yeah, Reed Elsevier has done many sketchy things in the past. Too bad they own the majority of journals in my field (and pretty much every other field). One you have a monopoly on something, it's easy to screw your customers. Scientists should try hard to submit their work to other journals (especially in open source journals). Thanks for giving me another reason to try harder to stay away from them.
Springer/Elsevier produces a large quantity of what can only be called "publish or perish" books in computer science. Usually collections of bad papers by a small group of authors that are poorly chosen and even more poorly edited. In all fairness, they do produce an occasional book (usually monographs, and maybe one out of 50) that is worthwhile, but most of their publications are awful (and often enough worse than that). Even more, they're overpriced and usually copyright locked, so even the worthwhile stuff in them is hard to find unless the reader is willing to pay exorbitant copying fees.
Elsevier biomed journals are becoming increasingly difficult to use. They've failed to make the slightest concession to open access. When I see an abstract from an Elsevier journal I usually skip over it since the paper will be more difficult to obtain than other journals. Most of them are low impact factor anyway. Even submitting a paper on their website is unnecessarily difficult. Their attitude is just helping PLoS.
Reed Elsevier supported Inhofe because he came out against Open Access. Reed Elsevier and the American Chemical Society have been agitating on that issue for years.
Want to see where your representatives stand on science issues? Visit the Scientists and Engineers for America SHARP network page to find out. SEA's mission is to facilitate evidence-based decision making at all levels of government. SEA works to bridge the gap between science and politics. Click here to join SEA and become part of our grassroots movement for evidence-based policy.
I have greatly appreciated the Senator's 'Senate Environment and Public Works Committee' website (http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.WelcomeMessa…). This has been a useful source of detailed, calmly expressed, insight into the global warming scam. I regard this scam as the moral and intellectual low-point of the last 20 years.