A federal judge threw out a 2024 antitrust lawsuit alleging Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature and other major publishers conspired to fix the price of peer‑review labor and restrict submissions. Judge Hector Gonzalez found the complaint relied on ‘‘a series of inferential leaps’’ and lacked direct evidence of an antitrust conspiracy. Plaintiff Lucina Uddin had argued publishers’ trade rules — including guidance that peer review is volunteer work and that simultaneous submissions are unethical — functioned as cartel behavior. The dismissal reduces immediate legal pressure on dominant STM publishers but leaves unresolved broader debates over scholarly publishing economics, open access models and incentives for peer reviewers.