petersuber

1/ From the law firm bringing the #antitrust lawsuit against six academic #publishers.
https://www.lieffcabraser.com/antitrust/academic-journals/

The suit alleges three #anticompetitive practices:
1. agreeing to "fix the price…at zero" for the #labor of authors and peer reviewers;
2. agreeing not to compete for manuscripts, forcing authors to submit to one journal at a time;
3. agreeing to prohibit authors from sharing their work while under peer review, "a process that often takes over a year".

#Monopoly #PriceFixing

🧵

Academic Journal Publishers Antitrust Litigation

Academic Journal Publishers Antitrust Litigation On September 12, 2024, Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel at Justice Catalyst Law filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against six commercial publishers of academic journals, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Sage, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer, on behalf of a proposed class of scientists and scholars

Lieff Cabraser
Sep 14, 2024 at 2:02pmWeb
Show threadpetersuberSep 14, 2024

2/ Here's the legal complaint.
https://www.lieffcabraser.com/pdf/AcademicPublicationsComplaintFinal.pdf

The plaintiff is Lucina Uddin (@lucinauddin), a professor of psychology at #UCLA.

The six publisher defendants are #Elsevier, #Sage, #SpringerNature, #TaylorAndFrancis, #Wiley, and #WoltersKluwer. Another defendant is the #STM_Association, a publisher trade organization.

There are also 50 individual defendants ("John Does 1 through 50”) whose names will be revealed later.

Show threadpetersuberSep 14, 2024

3/ The plaintiff's two law firms have a good track record on antitrust litigation. See these pages from the main firm cited above and its co-counsel (h/t Nick Shockey).

From Leiff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein
https://www.lieffcabraser.com/antitrust/

From Justice Catalyst
https://www.justicecatalyst.org/law/cases

Antitrust & Intellectual Property

ANTITRUST & INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Lieff Cabraser is at the forefront of innovative and landmark cases promoting fair competition in the marketplace. We assist companies, governments, and consumers affected by anticompetitive conduct by assessing market circumstances and advising whether and how to pursue legal action. Our Labor-Antitrust group is actively investigating allegations of illegal employee pay

Lieff Cabraser
Show threadpetersuberSep 24, 2024

4/ Historical footnote. In 2002 the UK Office of Fair Trading (#OFT) reviewed complaints about #BigDeals and other #anticompetitive practices in academic #publishing. It found market distortions but decided 𝘯𝘰𝘵 to act — because of the then-recent rise of #OpenAccess. "It is too early to assess what will be the impact of this [digital publishing & access] but there is a possibility that it will be a powerful restraint on exploiting positional advantage in the STM journals market."
http://web.archive.org/web/20051025123345/www.oft.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/A56C7602-C0BD-428D-BED2-36784363243B/0/oft396.pdf

#Antitrust #Monopoly #Publishers

Wayback Machine

Show threadpetersuberFeb 2

5/ A US federal district judge just dismissed the #antitrust case against six academic #publishers (Jan 30, 2026).
https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/myvmqlljdvr/24-cv-06409-HG%20Uddin%20v.%20Elsevier%20B.V.%20et%20al.pdf

Article about the dismissal:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/academic-publishers-defeat-lawsuit-over-peer-review-pay-other-restrictions-2026-01-30/

"The four scholars, scientists and professors who filed the lawsuit in 2024 had not shown sufficient evidence of a conspiracy involving publishers Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publications, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wolters Kluwer."

#Monopoly #PriceFixing #USLaw

Show threadThomasSep 15, 2024

@petersuber @[email protected] The legal anti-trust complaint against the six dominant science-publishers organized in the STM is well worth reading. It also explains how the research community got there. I hold that there would be more to say about the economy and the ecology of science as social systems. A lot has happened since Popper, who described, essentially, a linear system of merit, or Kuhn, who described simple social system dynamics.

#science #historyofscience #sociologyofknowledge

Show threadAdam Shostack  Sep 14, 2024
@petersuber @nickm “expressly linking their unpaid labor with their ability to get their manuscripts published in the defendants’ preeminent journals”
Show threadAdam Shostack  Sep 14, 2024

@petersuber @nickm I wasn't aware the publishers had set up a cabal and published the rules of their conspiracy.

Maybe if they hadn't made it open-access ...

Show threadMathiasTCKSep 15, 2024

@adamshostack @petersuber @nickm

#OpenAccessCabal

Show threadSteve BellovinSep 14, 2024
@petersuber That's interesting. The first two are, at least in CS, the professional norm, even for non-profit and open access venues. In fact, in CS multiple parallel submissions is considered unethical, again regardless of the venue.