Six academic journal publishers are facing a class action suit in federal court over alleged antitrust violations regarding the payment of peer reviewers and submission restrictions.
The proposed class action, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, was brought by Dr. Lucina Uddin, a University of California Los Angeles neuroscience professor, against Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publications, Taylor & Francis, and Springer Nature.
The complaint alleges that the defendants violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1, which prohibits agreements to restrain trade and commerce, by conspiring to artificially deflate, maintain, or stabilize the wages of peer reviewers and requiring authors to submit manuscripts for publication to only one journal at a time while also preventing them from sharing accepted manuscripts, thereby restricting competition.
The complaint alleges that the defendants conspired to price fix peer review services at zero by refusing to pay scholars for their peer review services. It alleges that the defendants “essentially agreed to hold the careers of scholars hostage” when they coupled scholars’ ability to get published in the journals with their willingness to conduct peer reviews for free.
It further alleges that the defendants agreed not to compete with one another by requiring scholars to submit manuscripts to only one journal at a time, reducing competition among the defendants and decreasing incentives to review and publish submissions with any haste. The single submission rule, alleges the complaint, also takes away any negotiation leverage a scholar may have if more than one journal could make an offer of publication.
Finally, it alleges that the defendants united to restrict scholars’ ability to freely share the scientific advancements detailed in their submissions while under peer review, a process that can take over a year. Further, the complaint alleges, the defendants often require scholars to transfer all intellectual property rights without compensation if their work is selected for publication.
As alleged in the complaint, Elsevier alone made $3.8 billion in revenue with a 38 percent profit margin in 2023 from its peer-reviewed journals while Taylor & Francis made $739 million with a profit margin of 35 percent. (Comparatively, Apple’s profit margin was 30 percent and Google’s was 25 percent, says the complaint.) Together, the complaint states, the defendants generated over $10 billion in revenue from their peer-reviewed journals.
The harm to the public interest, the complaint argues, is the enormous amount of taxpayer money (money paid to publicly funded researchers who do the work, check the work, and consume most of the work) diverted from scientific research. Further harm to the public is done, says the complaint, when scholars are prohibited from sharing their research, thus holding back science and delaying important advances across all fields. “It will take longer to find effective treatments for cancer,” the complaint notes, “It will take longer to find technological tools to combat climate change.”
Additional Reading
Academic publishers face class action over ‘peer review’ pay, other restrictions, Reuters (September 13, 2024)
Antitrust Laws, Justia
Uddin v. Elsevier Complaint
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