Complaint also blames the six leading publishers with hampering science for profit.
Six major publishers of scientific journals – Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publications, Taylor and Francis, and Springer Nature – have been named in a proposed class action which claims they conspired to control author compensation and publishing opportunities (Lucina Uddin v. Elsevier, et al., No. 1:24-cv-06409-HG, E.D.N.Y.).
Filing the case in the Eastern District of New York under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, the plaintiff says the publishers have agreed to not compensate scholars for performing the publishers’ peer review services, to require authors to submit manuscripts to only one journal at a time, and to bar scholarly authors from sharing their research while their work undergoes peer review.
The named plaintiff, a neuroscience professor at UCLA, asserts that the publishers are generating enormous profits while delaying and limiting the publication of important research. The billions of dollars generated by the publishers’ alleged conduct could have funded research, the plaintiff maintains. In addition to treble damages, she wants the court to order the publishers to dissolve what she says are unlawful agreements. The academic publishing industry is fueled by the goodwill of scholars and taxpayers, she commented.
“Each element of the Scheme mutually reinforces each other and is part of a common understanding among the Publisher Defendants to create a set of rules that cement their market dominance and maximize the amount of money they can divert from scientific research into their pockets,” the complaint says. Experts cited in the pleading “identified several barriers to entry that prevent meaningful competition, including substantial network effects, high switching costs, and institutional inertia.”
The complaint defines the class as: “All natural persons residing in the United States who performed peer review services for, or submitted a manuscript for publication to, any of the Publisher Defendants’ peer-reviewed journals from September 12, 2020, to the present.”
