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I have a question: Why are we still in business with Elsevier in 2026?
Academic institutions are committed to democracy, digital sovereignty and environmental sustainability.
But do these values also guide purchasing decisions? Let’s look at Elsevier, a major provider of academic publishing, analytics and software, and its wider corporate group:
🛢️ Elsevier works with the fossil fuel industry, providing data and analytics that support oil and gas exploration.
🔎 Elsevier’s corporate affiliate LexisNexis Risk Solutions provides data services to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
🏝️ And companies within Elsevier’s corporate structures have been registered in jurisdictions commonly associated with tax avoidance and tax-haven structures.
At the same time, academic institutions collectively spend 3.16 billion Euros on Elsevier’s products and services.
💰 Every contract is also a decision about which infrastructures and organisations we fund.
There are alternatives. Open infrastructures are built around a fundamentally different model: transparency, community governance and the idea that critical scholarly infrastructure should serve the public interest.
Yet many of these infrastructures struggle due to insufficient funding.
This is not about pretending that changing infrastructure is easy. It isn’t. But surely we should at least be asking ourselves:
👉 Are the organisations we fund helping to build the future we want?
Sources in the reply.
#WhoAreWeFunding #FundTheFutureYouWant
#OpenScience #OpenInfrastructures
#NoTechForICE #S4F