Academic publishers face class action over ‘peer review’ pay, other restrictions

By Mike Scarcella Sept 13 (Reuters) - A University of California Los Angeles neuroscience professor has sued six major academic journal publishers, claiming in a proposed class action that they violated antitrust law by barring simultaneous submissions to multiple journals and denying pay for “peer review” services. Professor Lucina Uddin filed the lawsuit in Brooklyn federal court on Thursday against Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publications, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wolters Kluwer. Scholarly journal submissions are reviewed by other experts in the author’s field to vet their submissions for publication and comment on their findings. Uddin said that the practice of not paying scholars for peer reviews amounted to unlawful price-fixing. The lawsuit also said the publishers unlawfully agreed not to compete with each other for manuscripts, reducing any incentive to review and publish work more quickly. Wiley in a statement said the claims “are without merit.” Wolters Kluwer, Elsevier and the other defendants declined to comment or did not immediately respond to a request for one. Dean Harvey, a lawyer for Uddin, said in a statement that the for-profit academic publishing industry had earned billions “exploiting the goodwill and hard work of brilliant scholars, and of taxpayers who foot the bill to create their product.” The lawsuit said the publishing defendants in 2023 collectively received more than $10 billion in revenue from their peer-reviewed journals. Uddin has been a professor in UCLA’s psychology department since July 2023. Her complaint said she has published more than 175 academic articles and provided peer review services for more than 150 journals. The lawsuit seeks class-action status for an estimated “hundreds of thousands” of class members. “It has become increasingly difficult to coerce busy scholars into providing their valuable labor for nothing,” Uddin said, and manuscripts can sit awaiting peer review for months or years. Her lawsuit also challenged what it called a “gag” rule that bars scholars from freely sharing scientific advancements in their manuscripts while they are under peer review. Scholars often must sign away intellectual property rights to their work in exchange for nothing, the lawsuit said, while the publishers charge “the maximum the market will bear for access to that scientific knowledge.” The case is Dr. Lucina Uddin v. Elsevier BV et al, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, No. 1:24-cv-06409. For plaintiffs: Dean Harvey of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, and Benjamin Elga of Justice Catalyst Law For defendants: No appearances yet