Nicolas Hulscher Discusses the Journal Cartel
Is there a journal cartel? Nicolas Hulscher says yes and claims it is rife with corruption in this post on X:
The Fall of the Journal CartelMost of the major publishers, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Sage Publications and Taylor & Francis, have formed a cartel under the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers.
The Cartel controls two-thirds of global journal publications, controls the narrative, enforces unpaid peer reviews, restricts manuscript submissions, and delays scientific progress—all to protect their multi-billion-dollar profits. This resulted in a recent class action lawsuit against the Cartel for “tremendous damage to science and the public interest.”
Nearly half of medical journal editors have financial conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical companies. Moreover, 59% of peer-reviewers for major medical journals received more than $1 billion from drug companies from 2020 to 2022.
The widespread corruption embedded within the nearly closed system of the Journal Cartel operates in a way that resembles a high-entropy state, as described by the second law of thermodynamics.
According to this principle, isolated systems naturally progress toward greater disorder, a state of entropy that ultimately becomes unsustainable and leads to system collapse.
In the case of the academic publishing industry, the compounded effects of internal corruption, lack of transparency, unethical censorship, and growing public awareness act as catalysts, pushing the system toward inevitable instability. Consequently, unless radical structural reforms are introduced, the Journal Cartel will face eventual collapse under the weight of its own entropy.
The Cartel’s unsustainable global monopoly on science will fall in due time, in accordance with natural laws. Until then, we can and will continue to battle against them and publish with journals outside the Cartel’s influence in our best attempt to advance scientific knowledge and protect public health.
Truth always prevails in the end.




