Academic publishers face antitrust lawsuit

Six scholarly publishers have been hit with an antitrust lawsuit for allegedly appropriating billions of dollars in public funds that the plaintiffs argue would otherwise have been used to carry out scientific research. The complaint was filed in the Eastern District of New York by plaintiffs that include a researcher who says they conducted peer review for all six companies : Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Sage Publications, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer. The complaint alleges that the publishers engaged in a scheme that, in addition to diverting taxpayer money, has prevented scholars from freely exchanging information and created a peer-review crisis. “The Scheme has held back science, delaying advances across all fields of research,” it says . The suit lays out three main claims. One is that the six publishers colluded to fix the price of peer review at zero by linking researchers’ unpaid labor to their ability to