A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by researchers alleging that major publishers of academic research conspired to create a set of illegal and anticompetitive business practices that exploit the scientific workforce.
Scientists claimed that publishers had violated the Sherman Act, a federal law that outlaws monopolistic business practices, by having researchers peer review articles for free, forbidding the submission of manuscripts to more than one journal at a time, and preventing authors from freely discussing submitted manuscripts. As evidence, researchers cited a document referencing these practices that was published by the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers, or STM, a trade association of publishers.
But on Friday, Hector Gonzalez, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, found that the plaintiffs had failed to state a claim — meaning that, even if all the factual allegations were true, they did not merit any legal action. In his opinion, the judge wrote that the STM document, the International Ethical Principles for Scholarly Publication, was not evidence of an anticompetitive scheme.
