Federal judge dismisses antitrust allegations against top publishers

Dive Brief:

A federal judge last week dismissed an antitrust lawsuit against six major academic publishers, ending a legal battle over their peer review and submission practices.
The lawsuit against Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Wiley, Sage Publications, Taylor & Francis, and Springer Nature argued that several of the publishers’ practices functioned as a conspiracy to fix the price of peer review labor at $0, restrict academics from submitting to more than one journal at a time and limit their ability to share their work. 
But U.S. District Judge Hector Gonzalez on Jan. 30 ruled the lawsuit relied on “a series of inferential leaps” and failed to demonstrate “direct evidence of an antitrust conspiracy.”

Dive Insight:

Lucina Uddin, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, filed her complaint in 2024 and sought class-action status to include U.S. residents who have provided peer review for or submitted a manuscript to any of the publishers since 2020.

Prior to the case’s dismissal, three more academics had joined Uddin as plaintiffs: University of New Orleans professor Robert Mahon, Feinstein Institutes professor Elvisha Dhamala, and University of California, Berkeley professor Shelley Facente.

The six defendants are each dominant in the field of publishing academic research. In 2023, they brought in a combined $10 billion in revenue from their peer-reviewed journals, according to the original complaint. It also noted the defendants reported high profit margins, sometimes exceeding 30%.

All six publishers are members of the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers, also known as STM. The lawsuit named the trade organization as a defendant, alongside Taylor & Francis’ parent company, Informa, and Wolters Kluwer’s health division.

The plaintiffs argued that STM functioned as a cartel whose members are responsible for publishing nearly two-thirds of all journal articles worldwide. STM has guiding principles that call the peer review process “volunteer work” and say submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal at a time “constitutes unethical behaviour and is unacceptable.”

By agreeing to not pay for peer reviewers’ time, the publishers effectively prevented the reviewers’ professional advancement unless they provided unpaid labor, the lawsuit said. 

STM’s principles acknowledge that “it is generally agreed that scholars who wish to have their own work published in journals have an obligation to do a fair share of reviewing for these journals.” And in academia, publishing research is necessary to advance in one’s career — hence the adage “publish or perish.” 

The publishers filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit in the first half of last year, arguing that the principles in question were part of larger guidance on ethical scholarly publishing rather than mandates. Nearly a year later, Gonzalez sided with the companies.

In his Jan. 30 ruling, the judge said the plaintiffs failed to plausibly argue that the principles are “direct evidence of a conspiracy.”

To read the rules as “anything other than a collection of policies and guidelines concerning best practices for publishers, editors, and authors involved in the scholarly publication process requires a significant inferential leap,” he said.

Furthermore, Gonzalez said the plaintiffs presented a “self-serving interpretation” of four of STM’s policies while disregarding the other 17.

For example, the aim of the publishers’ principle preventing authors from publicly discussing their submitted work during the review process, Gonzalez said, is “not to ‘gag’ authors from sharing important research, but to protect authors by establishing a norm that ensures an author’s work is held in confidence prior to publication.”

Informa, Taylor & Francis and Wolters Kluwer, all based outside the U.S., also argued that Gonzalez’s courtroom doesn’t have jurisdiction over them. The judge agreed.

Disclosure: Informa owns Taylor & Francis and a controlling stake in Informa TechTarget, the publisher behind Higher Ed Dive. Informa has no influence over Higher Ed Dive’s coverage.