Lawsuit shows how prestige drives scientific publications

According to a federal antitrust lawsuit filed earlier this month, a prominent neuroscientist accuses some of the companies that have published her work in top peer-reviewed journals of conspiring to “take scientists’ careers hostage” in the name of maximizing profits.

It’s the latest case of resistance from scientists to the $19 billion science publishing industry, which often relies on the unpaid work of career-minded scientists to create exclusive — and highly lucrative — content.

The lawsuit aims to overturn that system, though experts are skeptical that a legal challenge alone can spark broader change. That’s because scientists have relied for decades on publishing their research in prestigious journals to advance their careers — and that pressure has only intensified as the job market has become increasingly competitive.

“Regardless of its legal validity, the lawsuit is likely to have an explosive social impact,” wrote Sven Fund, managing director of Reviewer Credits, a network of peer review experts, in a recent post for Academic kitchen“At stake are not only legal issues, but also the legality of business models in scientific publishing.”

Courts could take years to decide whether the case against the six largest for-profit publishers of peer-reviewed scientific 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), has merit. If the publishers are indeed found guilty of conspiring to control the publishing market, lawyers who brought the case want them not only to terminate their contracts but also to pay an unspecified amount of damages to compensate for what they say are “artificially low salaries” for scientists.

Regardless of the outcome, the antitrust complaint sheds light on a larger discussion about who holds the power in a system that rewards scientists with promotions, tenure-track positions and research grants for publishing their work in high-impact journals like Nature, Lancet AND Advanced Sciencewhose publishers are Springer, Elsevier and Wiley respectively.

Impact Factor

Some researchers still depend on the prestige of the journals that publish their work for their career success, based in part on how often researchers cite papers published in those journals. So, several experts say, the lawsuit also reveals how the scientific community’s obsession with prestige has undermined its position in the marketplace.

Academia’s reliance on such metrics to assess the value of scholarly works has created a niche market that publishers have filled, said Roger Schonfeld, vice president of organizational strategy and libraries, scholarly communications and museums at Ithaka S+R.

And for better or worse, as long as there is competition for grants and professorships, “someone is going to have to help them evaluate who to hire and who to fund,” he said. “And whoever does that will have the power.”

On paper, the system rewarded the plaintiff in the lawsuit, Lucina Uddin, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has published more than 175 scientific papers and provided peer-review services for more than 150 journals, including those published by the companies she is suing.

But like most scientists competing for work in a saturated market, she did almost all of that work for free. Meanwhile, for-profit publishers exploit that work to make huge profits, charging authors hundreds—even thousands—of dollars in article-processing fees and selling pricey journal subscriptions to academic libraries. Scientists who can’t pay don’t publish their work.

This power imbalance is at the heart of Uddin’s lawsuit, which accuses six publishers and STM of colluding to create a “scheme” that not only hindered scientific progress but also “illegally diverted billions of taxpayer dollars annually from science” to corporate coffers. Uddin filed the lawsuit on behalf of other scientists and scholars. If the court confirms class-action status, the lawsuit could include hundreds of thousands of additional plaintiffs.

Is this a “plan”?

The lawsuit alleges that six academic publishers — which own 53% of academic journals — were able to carry out a so-called scheme by forming a “cartel” through STM and setting the price of peer review services at zero. Those journals earned more than $10 billion in revenue in 2023.

In this way, the lawsuit says, publishers “agreed to force researchers to do their work for free by explicitly linking their unpaid work to their ability to publish their manuscripts in defendant publishers’ journals,” which can enhance a researcher’s curriculum vitae in what the lawsuit calls “the ‘publish or perish’ world of academia.”

The lawsuit also accuses the publishers of agreeing not to compete with each other by requiring scientists to submit their manuscripts to one journal at a time and prohibiting them from sharing results when their manuscripts are peer-reviewed. This allows the publishers to “act as if the scientific advances reflected in the manuscripts were their own,” it says.

The three elements of the alleged scheme work together “to create a set of rules that cement (publishers’) dominance in the marketplace and maximize the amount of research dollars that end up in their pockets,” the lawsuit claims. “The scheme was incredibly profitable for Defendant Publishers while causing enormous harm to science and the public interest.”

All six publishers named in the lawsuit declined to comment on the matter. Inside higher educationthough a Wiley spokesperson said in an email that the publisher considers the claims to be “baseless.”

But Christopher Jon Sprigman, a law professor and co-director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at New York University School of Law, who specializes in antitrust law, is not so sure.

“These rules are incredibly anti-competitive,” he said. “As the complaint suggests, in order to join (STM) and maintain good standing in the industry, (publishers) must agree in principle to impose the rules.”

“Their Worst Enemies”

While the court system will have the final say, Sprigman said the issues raised in the lawsuit are a reminder that by focusing on a particular journal’s profile when assessing the value of a scientist’s research, scientists have become “their own worst enemies.”

“Science and knowledge pay a huge tax to commercial publishers for the prestige economy on which they depend,” he said. “If academics had other prestige mechanisms to fall back on—such as reading articles carefully when making hiring decisions—they wouldn’t be so dependent on publishers.”

Dean Harvey, one of the lawyers representing Uddin, said: Inside higher education that he at least hopes the case will “spark more conversations among scientists about alternative systems” and that the sparking of competition among large publishers “will lead to solutions that we cannot foresee now.”

The negative reaction from the academic community against for-profit publishers has been growing for years.

In the early 2010s, a group of scientists initiated the ongoing Cost of Knowledge protest movement, calling on scientists to boycott Elsevier’s business practices by refusing to publish, peer review, or serve on the editorial boards of its journals; to date, the petition has been signed by over 20,000 people. In 2019, the University of California system canceled its contract with Elsevier after failed negotiations over open access fees and the company’s paywalls, although they have since agreed to a new agreement.

The pandemic has seen a revival among some scientists of the idea of ​​paying reviewers for their work. And this summer, authors who have published at Wiley and Taylor & Francis raised alarm bells when publishers made millions selling their data to tech companies that use it to train proprietary AI models.

But Dave Hansen, executive director of the Authors Alliance and a copyright lawyer, said he wasn’t convinced that forcing major publishing houses to pay reviewers or compete for articles “would make much difference to what promotion and tenure committees think about those journals or publishers.”

Instead, he said, “this change needs to happen within universities,” which need to “take article-level metrics seriously and evaluate research papers independently of the fact that they are published in a particular journal.”

To that end, Hansen added, Uddin’s case, which illustrates how some publishers have the alleged market power to “change the way scholarly work is published,” is “a fantastic tool for promoting these kinds of conversations.”