The Margin#
38 percent operating margin. Not in a technology niche, not at a defense contractor — at an academic publisher.
RELX, the British-Dutch parent company of Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher, reported revenues of over €3.5 billion in 2024. The operating margin sits at around 38 percent — higher than Apple in a good year, higher than most software companies commonly described as digital licensing machines.
What Elsevier sells is a seal. The seal is called peer review.
What Elsevier pays for it: nothing.
Who Issues the Seal#
Peer review works like this: a researcher submits a manuscript. The publisher sends it to two to four reviewers. These reviewers read the manuscript, examine methodology, statistics, references, and conclusions — and recommend acceptance, revision, or rejection. The publisher decides, and the article is published or not.
The reviewers work in their spare time. They are compensated with zero euros. In rare cases, token honoraria of $100 to $150 exist — nowhere near covering the time invested, and structurally irrelevant measured against Elsevier’s margin.
Since the spread of the open access model, authors pay on top: between $2,000 and $5,000 per article as an Article Processing Charge. This is usually covered by the university or funding body — ultimately taxpayer money or institutional budgets.
The model is precise: the publisher carries the label, the infrastructure, and the brand. Science carries the work. The public and its institutions carry the cost.
Springer Nature books €1.9 billion in revenue (2024). Wiley reaches around $2.1 billion. This is not a niche market.
Martinsried, Bavaria — The Industry Behind It#
The seal would be an academic problem if entire economic sectors hadn’t built themselves on top of it.
At the Innovation and Biotechnology Center (IZB) in Martinsried, a suburb southwest of Munich, over 40 companies occupy 26,000 square meters. In 2022 alone, €163 million in investor capital flowed into this single site. Next door: the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Helmholtz Munich, the Gene Center of LMU.
The BioM Cluster — the official network of Bavaria’s biotech industry — counted, in its own report for 2025/26, 548 companies, 59,000 employees, over €930 million in funding as a record figure, 26 new start-ups, and 72 active clinical projects.
This industry makes investment decisions. It applies for funding. It builds portfolios. The foundation: peer-reviewed publications.
Venture capital flows into biotech companies because their technology was “published in leading journals.” Due diligence processes check a founder’s publication profile the way a financial institution checks a credit rating. The seal is not an academic footnote — it is market infrastructure.
What the EMA and FDA Actually Say#
Precision matters here.
The European Medicines Agency states in its Policy 0070 that approval decisions are based on the clinical raw data submitted by the applicant — not on the peer-review publication status. The formal approval requirement is a dossier, not a journal article.
The FDA is structured somewhat differently: its concept of “Significant Scientific Agreement” requires that health claims be published in peer-reviewed journals. For off-label promotions, pharmaceutical companies are permitted under certain conditions to circulate only peer-reviewed articles.
De jure, peer review is not a universal regulatory requirement. De facto, it is the market validation system on which investor relations, scientific positioning, and regulatory communication are built. A company operating in the biotech market without peer-reviewed evidence is not a company — it is an idea.
The seal is the intermediary between the laboratory and the capital market. And that intermediary is operated without compensation.
The Pandemic as Stress Test#
COVID-19 did not break the system. But it made visible where the cracks run.
In May 2020, a study appeared in the Lancet — one of the world’s most prestigious journals — suggesting that hydroxychloroquine increased mortality in COVID-19 patients. The study was cited by governments and health authorities, clinical trials were halted, medical practice shifted — until it emerged that the dataset from the company Surgisphere had been fabricated. On June 4, 2020, the article was retracted.
The process designed to prevent exactly this — peer review — had failed. Not because the reviewers were incompetent, but because the system is structurally overwhelmed by speed and volume when pressure increases.
Ulrich Dirnagel of the Charité put it plainly: “Because scientific knowledge about the pandemic is so immensely important right now and at the same time needs to be communicated so quickly, some scientists have relaxed quality standards.”
Publishers navigated the situation: with preprint servers without peer review and an increased publication pace alongside a higher retraction rate in 2020 to 2022. The margin held.
The Transparency Problem#
Holst et al. documented in 2022 — published via PMC — a lack of robust integrity policies at German medical centers. A study in PLOS Biology (2021) documented systemic gaps in data and code sharing as well as conflicts of interest disclosures in industry-funded publications.
These are not scandals. These are structural findings.
A system running on unpaid volunteer work will degrade under increased volume and pressure. That is not a moral statement — it is an economic one. Those who work for zero euros can assume no formal liability. Those who work for zero euros will be the first to drop out when capacity tightens.
What the Foundation Carries#
Publishers, to be clear, are not villains. Elsevier operates an infrastructure that has functioned for decades. Springer Nature has launched programs to improve review transparency. Wiley has invested in open-access transitions.
None of that changes the structural question: a quality seal that supports a billion-dollar industry is issued by people who are not paid for it — in their spare time, alongside their primary work, with no formal liability for their recommendation.
If a concrete bridge is built and the concrete inspector is a volunteer, working in their spare time, uninsured — that is not a criticism of the inspector. That is a statement about the bridge.
The Martinsried cluster has €930 million in funding on that bridge. 72 clinical projects are running on that bridge. Regulators worldwide use it as a reference frame.
The bridge stands. The cracks are documented. And nobody asks whether the inspector got enough sleep.
