Complaining about academic publishing is somewhere between “hobby” and “righteous cause” for many researchers. So I imagine that many will be cheering loudly at the news that six major academic publishers are getting sued.
People are likely to focus on the three things the case says makes for unfair business practices:
- That peer reviewers aren’t paid, and that this is enforced by a “tit for tat” system where journals won’t publish your paper if you don’t review. (I know zero well documented cases of this.)
- That journals will not consider work submitted or published elsewhere (the Ingelfinger rule, I think).
- Submitted papers can’t be shared while under review.
If I wanted to sue academic publishers, I’m not sure these are the lines of attack I would use. These claims seem hard to stick to the publishers.
The first two points are about practices go back decades, well before
the consolidation of so much academic publishing into a few companies. Publishers can say, “These were practices established by the community that we adopted.”
And there are many journals not run by these companies that do the same
things. I suspect that the “We don’t consider work under review
elsewhere” is common across all publishing, not just academic journals. Publishers can say, “If all these other publishers have these practices, we are just in line with industry standards. And by the way, why are we being selectively prosecuted?”
The
third point, that journals “prohibit scholars from sharing advancements
in submitted manuscripts while those under peer review” seems to
pretend that preprint servers don’t exist.
But these counterexamples are beside the point, because legal question here isn’t whether journals do these things or that they are bad for research. The legal question is whether the publishers conspired to create those conditions.
I think that will be hard to show.
Now, may the plaintiffs can produce something like internal memos or emails between the publishers trying to kill proposals to pay peer reviewers. The academic equivalent to the tobacco industry’s “Doubt is our product” memo. That would be truly devastating. And, in all honesty, I wouldn’t put it past publishers to have some of these emails buried on servers someplace.
This lawsuit will be interesting to watch. Maybe the plaintiffs aren’t expecting to win, but are doing some consciousness raising. Even if they lose, this lawsuit might do some good by getting academics talking about publication, and maybe by prodding publishers to do better work.
External links
Academic Journal Publishers Antitrust Litigation
Prodding the behemoth with a stick
