The authors of three papers about abortion Sage retracted earlier this year have sued the publisher, alleging the company pulled the articles “for pretextual and discriminatory reasons.”
In February, Sage retracted three articles from Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology “because of undeclared conflicts of interest and after expert reviewers found that the studies demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor that invalidates or renders unreliable the authors’ conclusions,” according to the publisher’s statement at the time. Sage also removed the paper’s lead author from the editorial board of the journal.
A federal judge cited two of the articles last year in his decision to suspend approval of mifepristone, a drug used in medical abortions.
Sage’s actions “violated California contract, tort, and civil rights law,” according to the lawsuit, filed Thursday in California’s Ventura County Superior Court. The authors also allege the retractions have caused “enormous and incalculable harm” to their professional reputations, and “they are now being treated as pariahs.”
Their lawsuit seeks to compel Sage to enter arbitration of their claims, as required by the publishing agreements the authors signed with the company.
Lawyers for the authors claim Sage has “engaged in a months-long campaign of cat-and-mouse negotiations apparently designed to delay arbitration and pressure the Authors into waiving their discovery rights as a condition of arbitrating.”
Sage declined to comment on the pending litigation.
James Studnicki, the lead author of the three papers, previously told Retraction Watch the retractions were “a blatant attempt to discredit excellent research which is incongruent with a preferred abortion narrative.” When we asked Studnicki, also vice president and director of data analytics at the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, for comment on the suit, and what he and his coauthors hoped to gain from arbitration, he referred us to the “Demand for Arbitration” attached as Exhibit J to the petition.
In that document, the authors allege Sage “did not articulate any scientific basis or legitimate editorial policy for retracting the Articles,” and thus breached its publishing agreements in doing so.
The retractions “were also an act of invidious discrimination,” the authors allege, as the publisher “applied inconsistent retraction standards to the Authors based on Sage’s perception of the Authors’ pro-life affiliations,” in violation of California’s anti-discrimination law.
The demand for arbitration states the authors are entitled to monetary relief for the harm to their reputations. “[T]he only way to make the Authors whole is to grant injunctive relief requiring Sage to comply with the plain terms of its Agreements by rescinding its retractions,” the suit states.
Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology, is no longer accepting new submissions, according to its website. A Sage spokesperson did not immediately answer our query about when and why the journal closed submissions.
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Seems like a poor use of money. Maybe they hope acting like victims will help with fundraising.
Cheshire, I’m sure they’ve already made contact with fair-sized right-wing focus/pressure groups.
Yeah, money is almost certainly not an issue.
Someone has to speak for the real victims of this drug, and the articles are one indirect way of doing this. They are victims of a bureaucracy that is bigoted against their views. I know most do not believe in good and evil anymore, but Christian still do and this drug perpetrates one of the greatest evils in history.
Calm down there, fake Moses – it isn’t bigotry that you can’t make everyone else bend the knee. Bigotry is more like saying you know that most people don’t believe in good and evil because they’re not Christian. On top of that, who are you to talk about good and evil? Refusing access to mifepristone actually kills actual people.
Would the fundraising be on the order of Soros, Buffett, and Bloomberg? How much?
When you produce the receipts for these fundraisers, will they include line items for the dogwhistle you just blew?
Please keep us posted about the outcome.
Seems to me that removing works of fiction is within the rights of a scientific journal – there are pretty of magazines that will publish fantasy stories.
Or maybe this is the truth and what this drug does and what the people who support the drug do are grave and unspeakable acts of evil of the first order. Either way we as a society are splitting apart at the seems and our differing visions of reality cannot be rectified -To believe in neutrality of any institution anymore is the true fantasy
Or, you know, you’re wrong.
Censorship of science that disrupts your worldview is not how science works. If you can prove them wrong, publish it. The woke inquisition will fail, just as all anti-science crusades before it.
It’s amazing how much intersection there is on the Venn diagram for “people who cry censorship” and “people who idolize Andrew Teat.”
They did publish – problem was the science sucked. They couldn’t prove it didn’t suck, and that’s why they’re crying wolf instead.
There is not enough information here to determine the validity of their paper.
There appears to be quite detailed critique of the scientific underpinnings for the retractions here:
Ushma D. Upadhyay, Chris E. Adkins
Deception by obfuscation: Studnicki et al.’s retracted longitudinal cohort study of emergency room utilization following abortion,
Contraception,
Volume 134,
2024,
110417,
doi.org/10.1016/j.contraception.2024.110417
The author Ushma Upadhyay has her Ph.D in Public Health and is affiliated as a professor with ANSIRH.
https://www.ansirh.org/about/staff/ushma-upadhyay-phd-mph
I used to be on the newsletter for Retraction Watch, but I got tired of seeing obvious garbage in the comments every time an article was also a hot-button subject for right-wing polemicists. Comments from people coming in here making anti-semitic remarks and calling everyone else evil shouldn’t even be approved, to be blunt.