Peer Review Needs Pay Too, Scientist Says In Suing Academic Publishers

Reviewing scholarly articles is a whole lot of work that deserves pay commensurate with academics’ time and expertise, a neuroscientist said Thursday in a proposed class action calling out some of the academic world’s biggest publishers and the trade group that sets peer-review pay at a whopping $0.

UCLA professor Lucina Uddin’s New York federal court lawsuit alleges that in refusing to pay scientists, scholars and other experts for the hours they spend combing through articles submitted to academic journals, publishing giants like Elsevier BV and Wolters Kluwer NV have dramatically restricted competition. Elsevier’s parent, RELX, is also Law360’s parent company.

The zero-pay policy is one of what Uddin describes as the miserly restrictions on academic paper writers and reviewers imposed by the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers.   Also targeted is a prohibition on submitting academic papers to more than one publication at a time, meaning there’s no competition for papers, and a “gag rule” prohibition on academics sharing their work while it’s under review.

All told, Uddin says, the restrictions have cost academics billions of dollars every year while netting the publishers enormous profits off research funded by academic institutions and taxpayer dollars. They've also severely curtailed critical scientific research.

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, the publisher defendants relaxed the gag rule to help develop a vaccine faster,” Uddin said, arguing that the eased prohibition helped speed up vaccine development by letting scientists “freely share their discoveries and knowledge with each other.”

“The publisher defendants’ relaxation of the gag rule … during the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates that the rule impedes the pursuit of critical cures for other serious medical ailments like cancer, Alzheimer’s and HIV,” Uddin said.

Also targeted, alongside Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer and the publishers group,  are fellow publishing giants John Wiley & Sons Inc., Sage Publications Inc., Taylor & Francis Group Ltd., Springer Nature AG & Co. KGaA, and several John Does.

Taylor & Francis and Elsevier declined to comment Friday. The remaining defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit was filed by Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP and Justice Catalyst Law in  the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. In a statement Thursday announcing the suit, Lieff Cabraser cited the suit’s allegations “that these six world’s-largest for-profit publishers of peer-reviewed scholarly journals conspired to unlawfully appropriate billions of dollars that would otherwise have funded scientific research.”

According to the 42-page complaint, which seeks to represent anyone who did peer review work or submitted a manuscript to one of the defendants’ peer-reviewed journals in the last four years, the six targeted publishing giants collectively control 53% of all academic journals.

Alleging an agreement in restraint of trade, in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the complaint contends that the defendants have an entirely too-tight grip on the academic publishing industry, netting the publishers profit margins of over 30%.

“In 2023, the publishing defendants together received over $10 billion in revenue from their peer-reviewed journals,” Uddin said. “These astounding revenues and profits margins are sustained through collusion, and unlawfully divert billions of taxpayer dollars every year from science to the publisher defendants.”

In making that money, the publishers, which allegedly exert tremendous control over their industry group, have done a lot of damage, the complaint says.

“The scheme has resulted in a worsening peer review crisis, whereby it has become increasingly difficult to coerce busy scholars into providing their valuable labor for nothing.  Submitted manuscripts sit awaiting peer review for many months or even years. The scheme also prevents or substantially frustrates scholars from freely exchanging scientific knowledge with each other,” Uddin said. 

Iddin continued, stating that “the scheme has held back science, delaying advances across all fields of research. It will take longer to find effective treatments for cancer. It will take longer to make advancements in material science that will support quantum computing. It will take longer to find technological tools to combat climate change. And on and on.”

Uddin’s suit is seeking both damages and an end to those rules, which she contends the publishers are able to impose by tying peer-review work to actually getting published, the lifeblood of academia.

All that reviewing work, Uddin said, should cost the publishers a hefty sum.

“Even the publisher defendants’ own public messaging recognizes their immense gains from not paying peer reviewers,” she said. “STM’s 2012 report estimated the global value of peer review services at £1.9 billion annually, equivalent to about £1,200 per paper’ In today’s American dollars, that comes out to $3.7 billion a year.” 

Uddin said the rule limiting submissions to one journal at a time eliminates journals’ “incentives to review the submission promptly and publish worthy research quickly” and forces academics to choose between playing it safe by submitting to a less picky journal, or submitting to a pickier one and then starting over again if their paper is rejected.

As for the gag rule, Uddin argued that the restriction gets even worse when a paper gets picked up and becomes the publisher’s copyrighted property.

“The publisher defendants enforce the gag rule prior to and after publication. Prior to publication, the publisher defendants prohibit the public sharing of submitted manuscripts,” Uddin said. “After publication, the publisher defendants require authors whose articles are published in subscription journals to relinquish their copyrights, after robbing them of their bargaining power through the single-submission rule.”

Uddin is represented by Dean M. Harvey, Jallé H. Dafa, Benjamin A. Trouvais and Emily N. Harwell of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP and Benjamin Elga and Janet Herold of Justice Catalyst Law.

The case is Uddin v. Elsevier BV et al., case number 1:24-cv-06409, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

—Editing by Marygrace Anderson and Karin Roberts.