The Lawsuit against Academic Publishers

You may have heard that a scientist, Lucida Unin, has filed an antitrust suit against six major publishers of academic journals. The core charge is that the journals have concoted an anti-competitive "scheme" that forces scholars to work for free while they pocket billions in revenue:

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

In so doing, the suit says, publishers “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,” which can boost a researcher’s curriculum vitae in what the complaint characterizes as the “‘publish or perish’ world of academia.”

The suit also accuses the publishers of agreeing not to compete with one another by requiring scholars to submit their manuscripts to a single journal at a time and prohibiting them from sharing findings while their manuscripts are under peer review. That enables publishers to “behave as though the scientific advancements set forth in the manuscripts are their property,” it reads.

I think that this is undoubtedly true, but I'm not sure I blame the publishers for it. The root of the problem is the way scientists and other scholars fetishize publication in big-name journals. Because your whole career depends on those publications, you will of course do whatever it takes to place articles with those publishers, including following their anti-competitive rules and doing your part at peer review.

The solution is to forget about publishing in academic journals and evaluate scholars by the actual quality of their work. Everybody says this. A lawyer named Christopher Jon Sprigman puts it this way:

Science and knowledge are paying an enormous tax to commercial publishers for this prestige economy for which they depend on commercial publishers. If academics generally had other prestige mechanisms they could refer to—such as actually reading the articles more carefully when making tenure decisions—they wouldn’t depend so much on the publishers.

But nobody knows how to make that work. Let's say your colleague is up for tenure, but he or she is an expert in a field you know hardly anything about. How do you make your evaluation? Well, you can either spend a month of your life delving into that field in an attempt to figure our where your colleague's work fits in, or you can just check the names of the journals and the citation counts. So of course you just check the names of the journals and the citation counts.

So long as there are a dozen applicants for every academic position, and so long as we continue to judge professors by their scholarly credentials, it will be very hard to fix this. 

But empowering evil publishers is just one of the bad consequences of putting so much weight on placing articles in top journals. Worse in my mind is the huge pressure put on young scholars to get publishable results, which almost forces them to hack their work into some kind of positive discovery. The explostion of fraudulent or all-but-fraudulent work is only what I would expect from this system.

The rewards we give to people who get published in top journals, regardless of whether their work has any other merit, are a miasma of corruption that sits in the center of our scholarly world like a cancer on a vital organ. Wherever the cancer sits, it will eventually send its twisted offspring out through the body until the whole organism sickens and dies.