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A group of scientists and scholars are accusing six academic journal publishers of working together to exploit their labor, in violation of federal antitrust laws.
The scientists filed a class action lawsuit against Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publications, Taylor and Francis, and Springer Nature last week. The complaint outlines “a scheme” that they say resulted in “perverse market failures that impair the ability of scientists to do their jobs and slow dramatically the pace of scientific progress.” The lawsuit accuses the publishers of diverting billions of dollars from “scientific research into their pockets.”
The complaint argues that the publishers fixed the price of peer-review services at zero and agreed not to compete with each other by requiring scholars to submit their manuscripts to only one journal at a time. The lawsuit also accuses the publishers of prohibiting scholars from freely sharing their findings while those manuscripts are under peer review.
Justice Catalyst Law, a nonprofit, and lawyers from the law firm Lieff Cabraser filed the lawsuit on behalf of a group of scientists and scholars, but the lead plaintiff is Lucina Uddin, a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles. She’s published more than 175 academic articles, according to the lawsuit. The complaint doesn’t say how many people are part of the class action suit, though lawyers said the number of those who are potentially eligible is “at least in the hundreds of thousands.”
“The for-profit academic publishing industry is in the business of exploiting the goodwill and hard work of brilliant scholars, and of taxpayers who foot the bill to create their product,” Dean Harvey, a partner at Lieff Cabraser, said in a news release.
Lawyers noted in the release that because of the publishers’ actions, “It will take longer to find effective treatments for cancer. It will take longer to make advancements in material science that will support quantum computing. It will take longer to find technological tools to combat climate change.”
Wiley told Reuters that the claims “are without merit.” The other publishing companies didn’t respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
