Scientists' suit against top academic publishers lays bare deep frustration over unpaid peer review

In a stark sign of scientists’ escalating frustration with how academic journals operate, researchers are taking on six publishing behemoths in court, arguing that the system is exploitative and overly expensive, and that it relies on illegal and anticompetitive practices.

Four researchers have sued six of the world’s biggest publishers: Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publications, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wolters Kluwer. The scientists allege that these publishers violated federal antitrust law by colluding not to pay researchers for peer reviewing manuscripts, preventing them from submitting papers to more than one journal at a time, and blocking authors from publicly discussing or sharing work once they’ve submitted it to a journal.

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