An unusual lawsuit that seeks to break up an alleged multibillion-dollar “scheme” by academic-publishing behemoths has made waves since it was filed last week. While the effort gives prominent voice to years-old complaints by rank-and-file academics, experts say some of its claims oversimplify publishers’ practices.
The lawsuit, filed by a University of California at Los Angeles professor in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, is the latest episode in a decades-long debate over who bears the costs and who reaps the benefits in academic publishing. If a court grants the suit’s request for class-action status, a lengthy courtroom battle over deeply entrenched publishing practices could follow, with potentially far-reaching repercussions for academe.
Lucina Uddin, the professor who filed the suit, is suing industry giants Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publications, Taylor & Francis, and Springer Nature — which together own about 53 percent of all academic journals, according to Uddin’s initial complaint. The lawsuit also targets 50 unnamed defendants who “may have colluded with [the publishers] in the creation, maintenance, or enforcement of [their] anticompetitive conduct.”
Uddin claims the publishers are engaged in a three-pronged conspiracy — referred to throughout the lawsuit as “the Scheme” — that violates longstanding antitrust laws. Under the “Scheme,” publishers allegedly prevent academics from submitting works to more than one journal at a time, fix peer-review payment at $0, and enforce strict “gag rules” barring researchers from discussing their findings during prolonged peer reviews.
The suit argues that the publishers have formed a “cartel” through the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM), which is also named as a defendant. The complaint says STM members, including the six publishers, adhere to policies that treat peer review as “volunteer work” and impose additional restrictions on manuscript submissions and sharing research during the review process.
“The Scheme has held back science, delaying advances across all fields of research,” the lawsuit says. “It will take longer to find effective treatments for cancer. It will take longer to make advancements in material science that will support quantum computing. It will take longer to find technological tools to combat climate change.”
The lawsuit seeks to enjoin the publishers’ alleged agreement, and claw back damages for an estimated “hundreds of thousands” of scholars who have reviewed for or submitted a manuscript to any of the named publishers since 2020 — a dollar amount which could be in the billions.
A spokesperson for Wiley wrote in an email to The Chronicle that “while we cannot comment on the specifics of the claims at this time, we believe they are without merit.” The other five defendants did not respond to requests for comment.
Uddin, a neuroscientist with expertise in developmental disorders, has published over 175 academic articles and peer reviews for more than 150 journals, including ones owned by all six of the named publishers, according to the lawsuit.
Uddin declined a request for an interview and directed The Chronicle to her legal team, which includes Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, a firm that specializes in class-action cases, and Justice Catalyst Law, a nonprofit which purses “impact cases” that “advance economic and social justice,” according to its website.
Benjamin Elga, the executive director of Justice Catalyst, told The Chronicle that the firm had been investigating the case before Uddin got involved. “Everyone has known for a long time that there’s a massive scandal in this industry,” Elga said. “This is a totally nonfunctional market that’s controlled by a small set of players who are doing all sorts of unfair things on both sides of the market, to the libraries and to the scholars.”
Elga thinks the publishers are in clear violation of antitrust laws, but industry analysts aren’t so sure.
In a series of short editorials published in The Scholarly Kitchen a week after Uddin filed the lawsuit, eight publishing experts argued it could have an “explosive societal effect” regardless of its outcome. Its claims of collusion, however — which a court must endorse for it to move forward as an antitrust case — could fall apart during litigation, they say.
“Something can be commonly done without there being a conspiracy to do so,” wrote Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, a librarian and professor at the University of Illinois who specializes in scholarly communications and publishing. She took specific issue with the lawsuit’s claim that the publishers colluded to make peer review an unpaid job. The STM’s “International Ethical Principles for Scholarly Publication” — the document that the conspiracy claim hinges on — mentions the “often unsung volunteer work undertaken by peer reviewers” but does not strictly prohibit payment. At least two of the named publishers, Janicke Hinchliffe wrote, pay reviewers an honorarium for their services.
“I see some common practices, absolutely, though I don’t see that they’re universal, and they certainly aren’t even universal within the companies that are main defendants,” she told The Chronicle in an interview.
Others argued that unpaid peer review isn’t a practice unique to the named publishers and that the alleged “gag rules” are not as strict as the lawsuit claims. Most publishers allow scholars to submit their manuscripts to preprint servers like bioRxiv and ArXiv — online repositories that allow researchers to share early versions of their findings before they are published in a journal.
The STM principles say “manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents” unless otherwise approved by journal editors. Arthur “A.J.” Boston, an associate professor of scholarly communication and law at Murray State University, said the supposed “gag rules” aren’t long-lasting or restrictive enough for a court to determine they impede the advancement of research.
“If you want to go to a conference and talk about your findings, you’re free to do that. If you want to talk about your findings in class or with colleagues in a hallway, you’re free to do that. If you want to post your underlying data in a repository, you’re free to do that,” Boston told The Chronicle. “The very specific way that they ask you not to talk about something is once it’s under submission. … It’s just this very narrow window of time that you’re not allowed to post the paper itself.”
Criticism of publishers’ practices and profit margins has grown louder in recent years, punctuated by complaints over unpaid peer reviews, costly submission fees, and controversial partnerships with artificial-intelligence companies.
Last year, more than 40 editors for NeuroImage and its companion journal NeuroImage: Reports, which are published by Elsevier, resigned en masse to take similar roles at a newly formed neuroscience journal published by a nonprofit. The exodus was spurred by Elsevier’s denial of the editors’ requests to lower its article-processing charge — a fee authors must pay to publish their work — from $3,450 to under $2,000.
Boston said that while Uddin’s case is likely to be thrown out, it could establish a legal foothold for academics to challenge prevailing issues in publishing, like processing charges for open-access journals.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a waste of time for them to have done this,” Boston said. “I don’t think this one’s going to go very far, but I think it will get certain things on the record that will help develop any future cases.”
