A Lawsuit, an IPO, and a Useful Idiot

Following up on yesterday’s post about SPARC and its continued coziness with the US government, a recent anti-trust lawsuit aimed at six large publishers — Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, John Wiley & Sons, Taylor & Francis, and Springer Nature — brings a few things to mind about market consolidation and SPARC’s role in it.

And it raises the question: Has SPARC inadvertently been Elsevier’s useful idiot?

There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s start with the lawsuit, touch on the Springer Nature IPO, and end with more about SPARC as a useful idiot.