Elsevier Wins Dismissal with Prejudice of Putative Antitrust Class Action

On January 30, 2026, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York granted with prejudice Cravath client Elsevier B.V.'s ("Elsevier") motion to dismiss an antitrust lawsuit alleging an international conspiracy to fix prices and suppress competition in peer-reviewed scholarly journal publishing.

Plaintiffs, a group of academics, filed a putative class action lawsuit asserting one claim under Section 1 of the Sherman Act against six publishers of peer-reviewed scholarly journals and their trade association ("Defendants"). Plaintiffs alleged that ethical guidelines (the "Principles") adopted by the trade association in 2013 constituted direct evidence of three explicit agreements among the publishers not to: (1) pay peer reviewers, (2) accept manuscripts submitted to more than one journal at a time and (3) allow authors to share research described in submitted manuscripts. Defendants moved to dismiss the claim, arguing that Plaintiffs failed to plead facts sufficient to show the alleged agreement, and that Plaintiffs' request in the alternative to amend the complaint should be denied as futile.

The Court granted dismissal of the claim in full, agreeing with Defendants that the Principles did not constitute direct evidence of the alleged conspiracy because they did not explicitly "require any publisher to adopt any specific practice," let alone "mandate any of the restrictions that Plaintiffs allege are anticompetitive." Having concluded that the Principles were not direct evidence of conspiracy, and further agreeing with Defendants that Plaintiffs had previously abandoned any reliance on circumstantial evidence of conspiracy, the Court held that Plaintiffs failed to allege a Section 1 agreement. The Court also agreed with Defendants' argument that Plaintiffs' cursory request for leave to amend was futile and granted dismissal with prejudice.

The Cravath team included partners Gary A. Bornstein, Andrew C. Finch, Sharonmoyee Goswami and Jesse M. Weiss and associate Jacob Freund.

The case is Uddin v. Elsevier, B.V., et al., No. 24-cv-06409 (E.D.N.Y.)