![]() ![]() ![]() This may be a fine point, but not a trump card because SSOs have and continue to give rise to antitrust concerns, and their activities often attract close antitrust scrutiny. So, in principle, adopting a set of license terms might be pro-competitive, and STM might argue that what it’s doing is akin to what standard-setting organizations (SSOs) do. Setting and implementing common standards may be beneficial for consumers because it may decrease various transaction costs or facilitate compatibility between products and services. For example, the benefits of standardization often justify some coordination among competitors. Antitrust law permits some coordination if it is ancillary to what otherwise would be a pro-competitive activity and if it restricts competition no more than what is reasonably necessary to achieve the pro-competitive objective. Therefore, when a group of publishers coordinates license terms, their concerted action is not conceptually different for antitrust purposes from a decision to coordinate subscription fees (downstream) or submission fees (upstream), and when the group represents the leading publishers and affects the majority of publications, antitrust concerns are further heightened.īut not any coordination among competitors is automatically illegal. Indeed, “erms of use are no less a part of ‘the product,’” 1and competition between publishers is supposed to ensure optimal license terms just as it is expected to guarantee competitive prices. In antitrust lingo the term price fixing is not limited to coordinating on price, but applies to any coordination that affects the quantity, quality, or any other feature of the product. Increasingly, as more and more authors consider the openness of a publication venue when they decide where to publish, publishers compete on this aspect too.įor antitrust purposes, when a group of publishers adopts a set of uniform licenses, or when it recommends that its members adopt them, they tread in the area of antitrust law’s core concern: “price fixing”. While academic publishers typically do not pay authors for their content (and therefore do not compete on price in that market), they do compete on other features, such as the prestige of the publication, the quality and speed of the publication process, how widely the publication is disseminated, etc. For example, they compete downstream (in the sale of journals and subscriptions), and they compete upstream (competing for authors’ original content). According to its website, “it has over 120 members in 21 countries who each year collectively publish nearly 66% of all journal articles and tens of thousands of monographs and reference works.” STM members are competitors. STM is an industry group of academic and professional publishers. This is problematic for authors who write to be read, and who deserve a competitive publishing environment that allows them to find publishers who share their commitment to openness. In other words, by adopting these set of model licenses and recommending that their members adopt them, STM and its member publishers might have broken the law. Authors Alliance recently joined a coalition of research, science, and education organizations that called on the Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) to withdraw a set of New Model Licenses for purportedly “open access” publishing.īeyond the flaws in those Model Licenses, the STM move raises some potentially serious antitrust issues. ![]()
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