In a stark sign of scientists’ escalating frustration with how academic journals operate, researchers are taking on six publishing behemoths in court, arguing that the system is exploitative and overly expensive, and that it relies on illegal and anticompetitive practices.
Four researchers have sued six of the world’s biggest publishers: Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publications, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wolters Kluwer. The scientists allege that these publishers violated federal antitrust law by colluding not to pay researchers for peer reviewing manuscripts, preventing them from submitting papers to more than one journal at a time, and blocking authors from publicly discussing or sharing work once they’ve submitted it to a journal.
“The scheme has been remarkably profitable for the publisher defendants, while doing tremendous damage to science and the public interest,” the plaintiffs claim in the suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
The publishers have said the allegations of collusion are without merit and that they will file a motion to dismiss the case.
It’s a case that could have sweeping implications for the research community. Publishing papers is central to how scientists launch and sustain their careers, and researchers have long complained that academia relies on unpaid and underpaid work. But scientific and legal experts told STAT that it’s unusual to see these arguments play out in federal court. They added that while it’s unclear whether this particular lawsuit will succeed, the rising discontent threatens to topple the system tasked with vetting, recording, and communicating biomedical breakthroughs.
“The need to confront what has been going on in the scientific publishing area is very overdue,” said Tim Errington, senior director of research at the Center for Open Science. “This [has reached] a fever pitch now.”
Academic publishing has changed dramatically since its humble inception in the 17th century, when scientific societies began publishing the work of their members. It’s now standard for new findings to undergo peer review, a process in which outside experts offer critical feedback that a researcher must address before their work ends up in a journal. And papers are now often published by massive, for-profit companies. Many major publishers have profit margins around 40%, exceeding corporate behemoths like Apple and Coca-Cola.
In their lawsuit, the four researchers argue that these profits are based on policies that violate the Sherman Act, a federal law that outlaws monopolistic business practices.
They have asked federal Judge Hector Gonzalez to issue an injunction forcing publishers to dissolve agreements around current practices. They’re also asking for triple damages to be awarded to themselves and anyone in the U.S. who has peer reviewed papers for the defendants’ journals since Sept. 12, 2020. The plaintiffs estimate hundreds of thousands of people have peer reviewed or submitted manuscripts to the defendants’ journals during that period, and they’ve requested that Gonzalez certify the case as a class-action lawsuit.
The publishers have said the claims are meritless. “The challenged practices have been commonplace in scholarly publishing for decades … and are consistent with long-standing, rational, independent conduct,” the defendants wrote in recent filings. “For these reasons, the [amended complaint] should be dismissed in its entirety.”
The original complaint was filed by Lucina Uddin, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Uddin was later joined by Elvisha Dhamala, a neuroscientist at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research; Shelley Facente, a public health researcher at UC Berkeley; and Robert Mahon, a geoscientist at the University of New Orleans. Dean Harvey, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, declined to make them available for interviews.
In the lawsuit, the scientists allege that the publishers formed an anticompetitive pact through the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers, or STM, a trade association that is also a defendant in the case. They claim this agreement is laid out in a document STM published in 2013, the International Ethical Principles for Scholarly Publication.
The document contains language stating that peer review is “voluntary work” and that there’s general agreement researchers who “wish to have their own work published in journals have an obligation to do a fair share of reviewing for these journals.” The scientists cite this wording as evidence that the publisher defendants “essentially agreed to hold the careers of scholars hostage” and force them to provide free labor. Meanwhile, they write, publishers pocket ever-growing revenues from journal subscriptions and article-processing fees with taxpayer-funded research dollars that could have otherwise supported science. (Some of that revenue is counted as indirect costs by universities, a category of research funding that the Trump administration is seeking to sharply reduce.)
“The scheme has held back science, delaying advances across all fields of research. It will take longer to find effective treatments for cancer,” the plaintiffs allege in the suit.
The researchers also point to language in the STM document stating that submitting an article to more than one journal at a time is unethical and unacceptable. This single-submission rule, they say in the suit, takes away authors’ negotiating power and incentives for publishers to review and publish manuscripts promptly.
The scientists further allege that the publishers have agreed to a gag rule, in which authors cannot freely discuss or share submitted manuscripts, noting the STM principles document states that “manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. They must not be shown to or discussed with others except as authorized by the editor.”
STAT contacted the publishers named in the suit, but all declined to comment on the case or did not respond. A spokesperson for STM wrote that the group vigorously denies the researchers’ allegations but declined to comment further.
In a letter filed to the court on Feb. 18, however, the defendants laid out the arguments they plan to use to request that the case be dismissed. They write that the STM document cited in the researchers’ complaint does not constitute direct evidence of an anticompetitive agreement but instead describes common practices that predate the 2013 document. The defendants also argue that these practices reflect common business interests, not collusion, citing rules against submitting the same study to multiple journals as an example.
“Journals receive millions of article submissions a year, and each one takes significant time and effort to review,” they write in the legal filing. “It is clearly in the independent economic self-interest of a journal to avoid expending editorial resources on an article that may be published elsewhere.”
The publishers also argue that there’s no evidence to support the researchers’ claim that STM meetings reinforced anticompetitive agreements. David Crotty, a former member of STM’s board of directors, also rejected that claim in a September post for The Scholarly Kitchen, a blog focused on academic publishing.
“It’s fascinating to me that, as someone who served two terms on the STM Board of Directors beginning in 2015, I had no idea that [2013] document even existed until I learned about it via the lawsuit, nor, as far as I can recall, were any of the activities alleged as conspiratorial ever discussed at any board meeting during any point of my tenure,” he wrote in the blog post. “That must be one seriously deep conspiracy if even the masterminds behind it were unaware that it was happening.”
In a document filed last week, the plaintiffs argued that the defendants’ arguments are meritless and that the STM document constitutes direct evidence of collusion since the group requires members to agree to its publishing principles.
Legal experts told STAT that while there’s little question unpaid peer review has helped enrich publishers, it may be difficult to prove the practices cited in the lawsuit were the product of an anticompetitive agreement. That’s in part because of a shift in how courts now interpret the Sherman Act, said Hank Greely, director of the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences.
“For decades now, the Supreme Court has been cutting down and cutting down on what the antitrust laws cover. The antitrust laws in the ’60s and ’70s would have been much more favorably interpreted,” he said.
A legal expert who routinely deals with academic publishing cases, and who requested anonymity because of their involvement in other ongoing litigation, was doubtful of the lawsuit’s prospects. They noted that the defendants aren’t preventing anyone from launching new journals that pay peer reviewers. And the expert added that plenty of publishers not named in the suit have the same policies as the defendants, arguing that this suggests current policies might not be the result of collusion.
“I think that it’s unlikely to prevail as a matter of law, although I think that the concerns that underlie the complaint are valid,” they told STAT.
In their latest filing, the plaintiffs write that while STM has more than 150 members, the lawsuit names only the publishers that created the publishing principles document and that control the association.
The outcome of the lawsuit could be unclear for months or years. The case adds to a growing list of moments when publishers have come under fire. There have been at least 28 mass resignations of editors from journals since 2020, according to Retraction Watch, often driven by disputes with publishers over open-access fees and heavy workloads. In 2019, the University of California system boycotted Elsevier, terminating its contract with the publisher over disagreements about making its researchers’ work freely accessible to the public (both sides ultimately struck an open-access agreement in 2021).
More than 20,000 researchers have joined The Cost of Knowledge, an ongoing protest of Elsevier’s business practices, with signatories committing not to submit papers to its journals, nor to peer review or provide other services for the publisher. And in 2020, James Heathers, a scientific sleuth, launched the 450 Movement, a call for journals to pay researchers $450 for peer reviewing a paper. His efforts, which were cited in the lawsuit, have not gained much popularity with publishers.
“It was obvious very early on, of course, that publishers found this sort of bemusing and annoying rather than coming out with an immediate plan to pay me,” Heathers, who is affiliated with Linnaeus University in Sweden, told STAT. “The most common response, when I do get one, is, ‘I’m not even sure what you’re talking about.’”
Lisa Rasmussen, a bioethicist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, noted that paying peer reviewers might incentivize researchers looking to make some extra cash to give submitted manuscripts a quick, cursory look rather than offer thorough feedback. But she adds that other ideas, such as offering reviewers free journal access or creating tools that allow researchers to track and receive recognition for peer review, have gotten limited traction.
Rasmussen is the editor-in-chief of Accountability in Research, a journal published by Taylor & Francis. She says the journal sometimes has to reach out to as many as 40 experts just to get two willing reviewers. She worries that could worsen if academic publishing and the incentives behind it don’t change.
“I think it is important to think about compensating peer reviewers. It’s not the ideal system that I would build, because I think we’re going to have other problems by doing that, but it just isn’t fair,” Rasmussen said before issuing a warning. “It’s going to be very soon unsustainable to rely on free peer reviewing.”