Sage ‘intended’ to cause ‘enormous and incalculable harm,’ to pro-life professors, legal filing says
Pro-life scholars and Sage Publications continue to battle over retracted articles.
Dr. James Studnicki and his fellow authors sued Sage Publications to compel arbitration after the publishing company retracted three articles for allegedly “pretextual and discriminatory reasons,” according to the legal filing.
Two papers studied the connection between abortion drugs and emergency room visits, and a third studied abortionists and admitting privileges, as previously reported by The College Fix.
There is a status conference about arbitration set for this Sunday according to the Ventura Superior Court database.
“Sage’s wrongdoing has [caused] enormous and incalculable harm to the Authors’ professional reputations, as Sage intended,” the legal filing at the California county court alleges.
All papers were published in the past several years in Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology. Studnicki is on the board of the academic journal, but he lost his position following the controversy over the studies. All three papers can be read at a Charlotte Lozier Institute website, assaultonscience.org.
Studnicki is also a former professor at the University of North Carolina’s Charlotte campus and Johns Hopkins University
The 2021 study, which found emergency room visits were linked to abortion drugs, “remains the second most-read article in [the journal’s] history,” according to the arbitration suit. However, it faced pushback after a federal judge cited it in 2023 in his decision to block President Joe Biden’s loosening of regulations around abortion pills.
The authors allege that Sage treated them differently than pro-abortion authors, including disallowing them from having associations and requiring disclaimers that were not applied to their peers.
They tried multiple times to arbitrate, but to no avail, according to the lawsuit.
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Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Phil Sechler provided further comments via a media statement to The Fix.
He said the company “did not offer a legitimate reason” for retraction. “The research was excellently done and adhered to Sage’s editorial policies,” Sechler, who is representing the authors, told The Fix.
The authors’ affiliation with a pro-life group, in this case the Charlotte Lozier Institute, would not impact the studies as there was a double-blind review process, Sechler said. The reviewer and author were unaware of each other’s identities and there were other reviews not affiliated with pro-life groups, Sechler said.
“Political affiliation is not a valid reason for retracting an article,” Sechler said. “Sage should know that censorship is just bad science.” Alliance Defending Freedom is now “simply asking to arbitrate this case in front of an unbiased judge with no further delays.”
Sage Publishing did not respond via email to a request for comment in the past several weeks.
The journal’s editor-in-chief, Gregory Garrison, also did not respond to an email and a voicemail left in the past two weeks.
An advocate for integrity in academic publishing, who edits a science news magazine, said publications should be transparent and consistent with standards.
Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch, said the issue is that when “publishers or journals” use “different criteria for different papers,” “that leads to mistrust.” He spoke to The Fix generally about retractions and censorship. He is the editor-in-chief of The Transmitter and a journalist in residence at New York University.
While Oransky is actually in favor of more retractions overall, he told The Fix on a phone interview there needs to be standard guidelines that are applied to everyone.
This, in his opinion, is the best way for publishers to let the scientific method operate and move closer to the truth.
He said both political sides engage in censorship, though perhaps one side is censored more than the other.
Editor’s note: The author is a former intern for Alliance Defending Freedom.
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