 Citation Metrics and the Forum Problem: Coordinated Journals and the Comparative Reach of Legal RedressDouglas Cumming No ek6ty_v1, LawArchive from Center for Open Science Abstract: Journal-level citation metrics have become the price system of academic science. They allocate prestige, steer submissions, anchor tenure and promotion, drive institutional rankings, and, through subscription demand and article-processing charges, convert directly into publisher revenue. This Article argues that when a single dominant firm organizes many journals under common control, coordinated conduct inflating those metrics can generate large private gains while inflicting a diffuse public harm that United States law, as currently configured, reaches poorly. The Article does not conclude that such conduct is beyond legal reach. It concludes that the reach is jurisdictional and structural: the doctrines best suited to the harm sit outside the forum in which the leading case was brought. Using a documented episode involving a cluster of Elsevier finance journals as its case study, the Article audits the governing doctrine. Antitrust, after the January 2026 dismissal of Uddin v. Elsevier, confronts a relevant-market problem, an intra-enterprise barrier under Copperweld, and a standing bottleneck under Illinois Brick, which together leave metric manipulation poorly served under Section 1. Two routes remain open: an inconsistency in the publisher's own litigation positions on editorial control, bearing directly on the single-entity premise, and the availability of Section 2 and of abuse-of-dominance liability abroad. Defamation law, governed by Milkovich and the scientific-debate abstention of ONY, very likely does not reach a publisher's expression-of-concern notice. Contract, tortious-interference, and retaliation theories fare no better. The Article states the publisher's strongest defenses and identifies what survives them. It shows that the recent dismissal rests on a view of concerted action in tension with the circuit's own precedent, and argues that the publisher's prolonged inaction, despite notice that an editor was handling his own papers and that citation stacking was underway, presents a case of willful blindness bearing on culpability and pretext. Comparative analysis shows EU and UK abuse-of-dominance law to be a materially more hospitable forum than U.S. antitrust, because the single-firm character of the conduct is fatal under the Sherman Act but not under Article 102 TFEU. Canada has moved furthest: following reforms in force from June 2025, its Competition Act combines single-firm abuse-of-dominance liability with public-interest standing and a disgorgement remedy measured by the defendant's gain rather than any plaintiff's loss, removing at once the barriers of concerted action, standing, and provable individualized loss that defeat the American claim. The Article closes with a reform program centered on metric-integrity trigger duties, coordination and pricing transparency, evenhanded conflict standards, and protection for scholars who document publisher conduct. Date: 2026-08-31 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:lawarc:ek6ty_v1 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in LawArchive from Center for Open Science |
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