A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses four major publishers of perpetrating a decade-long scheme to defraud the government by charging exorbitant article processing charges.
The case, which became unsealed July 30, claims Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Informa forced U.S. research institutions to submit false claims to the government for reimbursement through article fees up to 10 times the cost of processing the articles.
Juan Pablo Alperin, a professor at Simon Fraser University and codirector of the Scholarly Communications Lab based in Vancouver, is represented by two attorneys who have had blockbuster success in FCA cases over the past decade. He and his attorneys originally filed the case under seal in March 2024. The government declined to intervene in the case on July 23 of this year, and a judge ordered the complaint unsealed, which now allows Alperin to pursue the case independently.
Sage was also originally listed as a defendant in the case, according to the court docket, and University of Ottawa researcher Stefanie Haustein was a plaintiff. Both were dropped from the suit last week.
Publishers’ fees vary, but APCs for open access can range from hundreds of dollars for small journals up to thousands, with some topping $10,000 per paper. The real costs of processing such articles are between $200 and $1,000, Alperin claims in the complaint. The U.S. government requires papers based on federally funded research be freely available. The...
A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses four major publishers of perpetrating a decade-long scheme to defraud the government by charging exorbitant article processing charges. The ...