from the it-is-about-time-somebody-sued-the-bastards dept.
Article: https://dailynous.com/2024/09/13/journal-publishers-sued-on-antitrust-grounds/
From Dailynous:
Lucina Uddin, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the named plaintiff in an antitrust lawsuit against six publishers of academic journals: Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Wiley, Sage, Taylor and Francis Group, and Springer. The lawsuit accuses the publishers of collusion in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act, stating that they "conspired to unlawfully appropriate billions of dollars that would have otherwise funded scientific research."
The plaintiff "seeks to recover treble damages, an injunction, and other relief."
The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in New York, can be read in its entirety here. The early paragraphs in which the publishers' "scheme" is described are a good read:
The Publisher Defendants' Scheme has three primary components. First, the Publisher Defendants agreed to not compensate scholars for their labor, in particular not to pay for their peer review services (the "Unpaid Peer Review Rule"). In other words, the Publisher Defendants agreed to fix the price of peer review services at zero. The Publisher Defendants also agreed to coerce scholars into providing their labor for nothing by expressly linking their unpaid labor with their ability to get their manuscripts published in the Publisher Defendants' journals. In the "publish or perish" world of academia, the Publisher Defendants essentially agreed to hold the careers of scholars hostage so that the Publisher Defendants could force them to provide their valuable labor for free.
Second, the Publisher Defendants agreed not to compete with each other for manuscripts by requiring scholars to submit their manuscripts to only one journal at a time (the "Single Submission Rule"). The Single Submission Rule substantially reduces competition among the Publisher Defendants, substantially decreasing incentives to review manuscripts promptly and publish meritorious research quickly. The Single Submission Rule also robs scholars of negotiating leverage they otherwise would have had if more than one journal offered to publish their manuscripts. Thus, the Publisher Defendants know that if they offer to publish a manuscript, the submitting scholar has no viable alternative and the Publisher Defendant can then dictate the terms of publication.
Third, the Publisher Defendants agreed to prohibit scholars from freely sharing the scientific advancements described in submitted manuscripts while those manuscripts are under peer review, a process that often takes over a year (the "Gag Rule"). From the moment scholars submit manuscripts for publication, the Publisher Defendants behave as though the scientific advancements set forth in the manuscripts are their property, to be shared only if the Publisher Defendants grant permission. Moreover, when the Publisher Defendants select manuscripts for publication, the Publisher Defendants will often require scholars to sign away all intellectual property rights, in exchange for nothing. The manuscripts then become the actual property of the Publisher Defendants, and the Publisher Defendants charge the maximum the market will bear for access to that scientific knowledge.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday September 17 2024, @04:10AM (13 children)
Hope the professor wins. The "Single Submission Rule" was presented as an ethical standard, and I never could see what was so unethical about submitting to more than one journal. With Single Submission, they can put a perfectly good paper in limbo for months before rejecting it, costing the authors a great deal of time.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday September 17 2024, @06:58AM (12 children)
Submitting to multiple journals presents another ethical dilemma: it is incredibly wasteful on the resources of the publishing process. This by itself is a strong argument to uphold the "single submission rule". The way you do it nowadays is to put out a pre-print for everybody to read in parallel to the submission. Disallowing pre-prints is a totally unacceptable practice that is all but extinct. Those remaining journals need to be boycotted.
(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Tuesday September 17 2024, @12:40PM (3 children)
The price of peer review and publishing is not free. It's with intangibles like access to new research and status signaling of your research being published in the journal.
The same can be argued of the third policy (for example [theconversation.com] versus counterargument [science.org].
My take is that this lawsuit is frivolous, not only on the grounds that these policies are mostly beneficial to a functional journal process, but also because there's no evidence of coordination. How much coordination does it take to have a similar policy for decades? What collusion does it take? Consider this hypothetical example: the authors release to the press at a time that is disallowed by the rules mentioned; are promptly suspended from publishing by say the top three journals in their field - all owned by commpeting businesses/organizations; and subsequently the suspension is removed simultaneously by the three journals when they return to compliance with the original journal. We would have evidence of coordination and collusion between the three journals because how else can you explain the sudden simultaneous punishment and reversal of punishment?
Now consider the situation where the three journals have the same rules, but when you get kicked out of one journal for the rule-breaking in question, you just move on to the next. They have the same rules, but no interaction present between the three.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 18 2024, @03:10AM (1 child)
Every time I read this type of corporate apologist drivel I am reminded of this quote:
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 18 2024, @11:10AM
It's a shifty accusation that a large number of competitors in a market who barely top 50% "dominate" a market. This leads one to wonder if the plaintiff chose the six defendants because that's what was needed to exceed 50% by this metric.
Moving on, there are a series of complaints about an industrial trade group called "International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers" or STM for short.
Web search engines only refer to the lawsuit complaint when searching for "to learn, in order to earn" and "STM". Perhaps STM is not known as this because the phrase combination is conspicuously absent from the internet. The plaintiff then lists a series of documents from the STM that shows the alleged collusion accusations.
Link [stm-assoc.org] to the "so-called" "International Ethical Principles for Scholarly Publication”. On the above accusations, let's review what is actually written. From section 1:
From section 3.3.1:
So some vague exhortation that people who publish should also peer review. No evidence for the alleged enforcement of obligation presented. So we've walked back from a sinister effort to force researchers to do "free" labor to a more or less factual description of how peer review is done throughout a much larger portion of the industry than just the six defendant publishers.
What's bizarre is that the lawsuit's most credible claims have nothing to do with the quote in the summary. For example, back in the complaint:
But that's not what the lawsuit is about.
The particularly terrible arguments about the unfairness of publisher restrictions:
If class members were permitted to submit to more than one journal, then they could publish the same paper in more than one journal and fluff up their publication count. Further, what happened to all the talk about the unpaid burden peer reviewing? Now the plaintiff proposes to redundantly generate that burden multiple additional times for a single paper. This is just stupid.
Don't be surprised to see this lawsuit fail hard. Not because of powerful corporate cooties, but just because it doesn't actually show harm or a violation of the Sherman Act.
So sure, we can mindlessly label this Orwellian corporate apologist drivel. Or we can think. Your choice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 18 2024, @12:17PM
The price to publish is not free, but the insane profit margins of the top journals show that something is way out of whack. Couple that with the Microsoft or cable TV-like anti-competitive behavior they routinely employ, such as forcing libraries and institutions to purchase journal bundles instead of just the journals they want to purchase and I'm not so convinced of the frivolity of this case.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 17 2024, @12:47PM (3 children)
That's not an argument I would call strong. A public bidding for pre-prints between publishers would be more appropriate than any kind of limit on who can be submitted to, but as is the publishers get paid rather than paying authors.
The whole existence of these journals is archaic and outdated. Science should be a continuing discussion between scientists rather than publishers gatekeeping and choosing winners. We have the technology to make that possible today, only nation-state politics, tradition, and cultural conservatism are holding academia back from a true golden age.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 18 2024, @11:21AM (2 children)
What happens when the winning bid is negative? Because that would be the natural state for most would-be papers.
Think about it. I have a paper on psychological testing of gerbils watching MASH reruns. I submit it to 5 or so high tier journals plus a safety. Each journal throws three or so reviewers at the paper and the 18 or so reviewers all find the same common mistakes and issues that I had in my paper plus some formatting stuff particular to each journal. Once it gets far enough along, I drop the journals that aren't promising, meaning their efforts are wasted. Nobody is willing to pay money for my article, but I still manage to pay them to publish it in a few journals, because why go through all this effort to publish it just once? I'll make sure the title is cosmetically different in each submission for the sake of propriety. Next time, maybe I'll do 10 or 20 journals because my funding is dependent on publication count.
So yes, that is an argument you should call strong. Dropping this rule can result in an insane increase in workload combined with a massive reduction in progress from that work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 18 2024, @03:03PM (1 child)
I thought free enterprise was all about risk takers, darers! That's why entrepreneurs rake in the big bucks, no?
Maybe the business model of journals is just not viable? Why do they even have to exist at all as a commercial enterprise, regardless of whether or not they are raking in the ludicrous profit margins? Why {w|c|sh}ouldn't universities just publish on their own website? Then you can build in defenses of making sure that peer review is done properly, and not, for instance, done 'in-house' if you will...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 18 2024, @06:11PM
Ludicrous profits indicate there is some life to the business model. As to peer review, there are other ways it could be done, but not seeing it in your proposal. Might as well just dump everything to arxiv.org and have groups peer review stuff there.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Mykl on Tuesday September 17 2024, @11:34PM (3 children)
I say boo-hoo to the journals. They can afford to have a bit of 'wastefulness' (i.e. COST) to their processes. After all, their raw materials are free, they have a monopoly on their product and can charge whatever they like. It's pretty close to a money-making machine.
The whole industry is way too comfortable with the status quo - they need to be shaken up a little and exposed to competition.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday September 18 2024, @10:40AM (2 children)
To clear up a misunderstanding. The main wastefulness is on the academic side: peer-review and editorial decisions. I would believe academics (me included) would revolt at a change in this policy. It is basically an unwritten law in academics (single submission, that is). Also authors would have to retract a paper in time from other journals once it is accepted somewhere. It would be certainly completely unacceptable to have the same paper published several times. Citations wouldn't really make any sense any more in being no longer unique. There would be more problems down the line (differences in versions, contradictions, corrections, retractions, ...).
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Wednesday September 18 2024, @06:14PM
Perhaps. But boy, multiple publication would really help boost the count without much effort.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mykl on Wednesday September 18 2024, @10:45PM
I'm genuinely curious about this position. Two questions:
1 - I get the possible challenges with versions, updates etc. But would it really be all that bad if an article appeared in multiple publications? That happens all the time in news media and yet we still manage to reference articles when necessary. How, specifically, is having an article appear in multiple publications a bad thing for the author? In my mind it would increase their reader base and influence. It would be terrible for the publishers (as academics would now only need to subscribe to one or two publications rather than 6), but as I said earlier - boo hoo. It's not like news readers subscribe to 6 different news sites.
2 - How about an agreement that a paper will not be published elsewhere once it has been published in one of these journals? I can foresee possible problems with rushing the peer review process to be first to publish, but there would be little complaint from authors about an agreement to only publish in one spot once that publication has actually occurred.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Tuesday September 17 2024, @04:12AM
That's a very interesting argument, she's taken the standard way that journal publication is run, looked at it from a slightly different angle than what everyone is used to, and found anticompetitive behaviour.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Dr Spin on Tuesday September 17 2024, @06:49AM (2 children)
Hopefully "life imprisonment" for all the journals found guilty!
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday September 17 2024, @07:00AM (1 child)
Unrestricted lending on archive.org. That will teach them a lesson.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Freeman on Tuesday September 17 2024, @02:55PM
I could live with a copyright length of 7 years for scientific journals, without a possibility for renewal.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"