Antitrust Lawsuit Against Academic Publishers Dismissed

A federal judge last week dismissed a lawsuit filed by researchers alleging that major corporate publishers colluded to control the publishing market, STAT News reported.

Lucina Uddin, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, filed the lawsuit in 2024 against the six largest for-profit publishers of peer-reviewed academic journals—Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publications, Taylor & Francis and Springer Nature—and their trade association, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM). The lawsuit argued that the publishers violated the Sherman Act, a federal antitrust law, by having researchers peer review articles for free, forbidding the submission of manuscripts to more than one journal at a time, and preventing authors from freely discussing submitted manuscripts.

To support that argument, plaintiffs pointed to STM’s International Ethical Principles for Scholarly Publication, which references those practices.

But Hector Gonzalez, a United States District Judge for the Eastern District of New York, said that was insufficient evidence of anti-trust violation.

“Plaintiffs fail to plausibly allege that the principles are direct evidence of a conspiracy,” Gonzalez wrote. “To read the principles 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.”

Gonzalez also declined to allow the plaintiffs to update the suit, writing that “further amendment would not change the result.”