Scientists File Antitrust Suit Against Journal Publishers

A group of scientists and researchers accuse six publishers of scientific journals of working together to exploit their employees, in violation of federal antitrust law.

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 describes a “scheme” that they say has led to “perverse market failures that undermine scientists’ ability to do their jobs and dramatically slow the pace of scientific progress.” The lawsuit accuses the publishers of diverting billions of dollars of “scientific research into their pockets.”

The complaint alleges that the publishers set the price of peer review services at zero and agreed not to compete with each other by requiring scientists to submit their manuscripts to only one journal at a time. The lawsuit also accuses the publishers of prohibiting scientists from freely sharing their findings while those manuscripts are under review.

Justice Catalyst Law, a nonprofit group, and attorneys 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 neurobiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published more than 175 scientific papers, according to the lawsuit. The complaint does not specify how many people are part of the class action, although attorneys said the number of people who potentially qualify for the lawsuit is “at least hundreds of thousands.”

“The for-profit publishing industry relies on the goodwill and hard work of outstanding scientists and the taxpayers who foot the bill to create their products,” Dean Harvey, a partner at Lieff Cabraser, said in a press release.

The lawyers noted in a statement that because of the publishers’ actions, “It will take longer to find effective treatments for cancer. It will take longer to advance the science of materials that will support quantum computers. It will take longer to find the technological tools to combat climate change.”

Wiley told Reuters the claims were “baseless.” Other publishing companies did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.