Academic publishers defeat lawsuit over ‘peer review’ pay, other restrictions

By Mike Scarcella

Jan 30 (Reuters) - A group of major academic publishers convinced a judge in New York to dismiss a lawsuit accusing them of thwarting competition by barring scholars from submitting papers to multiple journals simultaneously and denying pay for “peer review” services.

In his ruling on Friday, U.S. District Judge Hector Gonzalez in the federal court in Brooklyn said 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.

The publishers, which had denied any wrongdoing, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Attorneys for the plaintiffs also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Scholarly journal submissions are reviewed by other experts in the author's field to vet them for publication and comment on their findings. The lawsuit said that the practice of not paying scholars for peer reviews amounted to unlawful price-fixing, in violation of antitrust law.

The lawsuit also said the publishers unlawfully agreed not to compete with each other for manuscripts, reducing incentives to review and publish work more quickly.

The plaintiffs said the publishing defendants collectively received more than $10 billion in revenue in 2023 from their peer-reviewed journals. They sought class-action status for an estimated “hundreds of thousands” of purported class members.

In seeking dismissal, the publishers said the "plain purpose" of the industry's practices was to establish ethical guidelines for scholarly publishing.

Gonzalez dismissed the case primarily because the complaint did not plausibly allege an unlawful agreement under antitrust laws.

The judge concluded that a set of principles issued by the publishers’ trade association were not rules or mandates but instead “collection of policies and guidelines concerning best practices for publishers, editors, and authors.”

The case is Uddin v. Elsevier BV, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, No. 1:24-cv-06409.

For plaintiffs: Dean Harvey of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein; and Benjamin Elga of Justice Catalyst Law

For Elsevier: David Marriott of Cravath, Swaine & Moore

(Reporting by Mike Scarcella in Washington)