A federal judge dismissed a 2024 antitrust lawsuit that accused six dominant academic publishers—Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Wiley, Sage, Taylor & Francis and Springer Nature—of conspiring to fix prices and extract unpaid peer review labor. U.S. District Judge Hector Gonzalez ruled the complaint relied on inferential leaps and failed to show direct evidence of a conspiracy. Plaintiff Lucina Uddin and co‑plaintiffs sought class status on behalf of academics who provided peer review since 2020; the ruling preserves publishers’ current editorial and peer‑review practices but leaves open debate about reviewer recognition and the economics of scholarly publishing.