Reed Elsevier, the world's largest publisher of scientific and medical journals, sells life through its journals, which include the Lancet, and death through its promotion of arms fairs. Can this possibly be acceptable? The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust thinks not and after several years of trying to persuade the company to abandon its promotion of arms has now sold its shares. The Lancet too has asked (registration required) its owner to abandon the arms business but has been ignored.
There are nearly 650m guns and light weapons in the world, and each year some 8m are added. Every year about half a million people are killed by armed violence. Most of those who die are civilians, particularly women and children. Since the second world war 85% of armed conflicts have been in the poor world, and by 2020, as the Lancet told us (registration required), deaths and injuries from war and violence will overtake deaths from infectious disease. Those of us who live in south London can testify to the consequences of guns being too easily available. War and armed conflicts are the main barriers to development in poor countries, and expenditure on arms diverts resources from education and health. Yet last year's UN conference on small arms collapsed without agreement, again as the Lancet told us.
Reed Elsevier runs arms fairs through its subsidiary Reed Exhibitions in Britain, the United States, the Middle East, Brazil, Germany, and Taiwan. Fairs have in the past included cluster bombs, which are especially dangerous to civilians because they fail to explode and create minefields. That is why the Lancet has consistently spoken out against cluster bombs. Last year's fair in the US included torture equipment sold by Security Equipment Corporation who use the grotesque slogan "Making grown men cry since 1975." The Lancet has long been a leader in condemning torture.
The company says that it is legal to sell arms, the trade is tightly regulated, and arms are clearly needed in a dangerous world. Unfortunately, the scale of sales is clearly excessive - and the harm that results is experienced mostly by women and children in the world's poorest countries. That's why medical journals have long drawn attention to the dangers of arms sales.
The hypocrisy of selling arms and health is particularly galling for the Lancet and its readers - because the Lancet has established itself as the world's leading global health journal. It is concerned not simply with scientific research that advances western medicine but also with poverty, injustice, environmental destruction, and war - the factors that mean life expectancy in the poorest countries is little over 30. The journal has had a radical tradition ever since it was founded by Thomas Wakley in 1823, and Richard Horton, the current editor, has restored that tradition and made it global. The Lancet has, for example, published (registration required) two important papers showing that deaths in Iraq are far higher than admitted by the Iraq, US, and UK governments. Horton can be seen on YouTube speaking about the excess deaths at an anti-war demonstration in Manchester.
The Lancet has taken the bold step of speaking out against its owner's excesses, but little has been heard from the editors, authors, and readers of the other 2000 journals published by Reed Elsevier. We need worldwide clamour to stop Reed Elsevier promoting the sales of arms and to save the credibility of its journals, especially the Lancet. So far, however, words have achieved little. It may be that the company needs to be hit where it hurts most - in its profits. The company makes most of its profits from its scientific and technical division, and, as I've argued (pdf) in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, if authors were to stop sending their research to the company's journals it would rapidly ditch its arms fairs.
