A University of California, Los Angeles neuroscience professor, Lucina Uddin, has sued six major academic journal publishers, alleging they violated antitrust laws by prohibiting simultaneous submissions to multiple journals and refusing to compensate scholars for peer review services. Uddin filed the proposed class-action lawsuit in Brooklyn federal court on Thursday against Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publications, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wolters Kluwer.
Uddin argues that the practice of not paying scholars for peer review constitutes unlawful price-fixing. She also claims that the publishers colluded to avoid competing for manuscripts, which reduced incentives to expedite the review and publication process.
In response, Wiley stated that the claims “are without merit,” while the other defendants either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for a statement. Dean Harvey, Uddin’s attorney, stated that the academic publishing industry, which has profited billions, exploits the goodwill and hard work of scholars and the taxpayers who fund the research.
The lawsuit revealed that in 2023, the six publishers collectively earned over $10 billion in revenue from peer-reviewed journals. Uddin, who became a professor in UCLA’s psychology department in July 2023, has published over 175 academic articles and provided peer review services for more than 150 journals.
The lawsuit seeks class-action status, representing potentially hundreds of thousands of scholars. Uddin emphasized the increasing difficulty in coercing scholars to perform unpaid labor, noting that manuscripts can languish in peer review for months or years. She also challenged the “gag” rule that prevents scholars from sharing their research while under review and criticized the requirement for scholars to sign away intellectual property rights without compensation, while publishers charge the highest possible prices for access to the research.
The case is titled Dr. Lucina Uddin v. Elsevier BV et al, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, No. 1:24-cv-06409.
