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Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges
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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 lawsuit alleges the publishers address this mandate by “extorting” APCs and copyright transfers from “unknowing” PIs who have an “understandable desire to publish in prestigious venues to advance in their careers.”
Alperin alleges he learned insider details about APC pricing as a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association, including “outright unlawful conduct” and “conspiratorial discussions” among the publishers, the complaint states. This included strategies by the companies to shield the viability of free open access options to ensure U.S. grantee institutions continued paying unnecessary APCs, according to his complaint.
Alperin told Retraction Watch he brought the FCA case to spotlight how pricing practices by some publishers are not in the public interest and to hold them accountable for those practices. He has conducted extensive research on APCs, which has found publishers use APC pricing strategically, rather than based on reasonable production expenses.
“More broadly, the goal is to help to create a more transparent and functioning market, because the market of open access publishing is one that is in many ways very dysfunctional,” he told us. “In part, the goal is helping to create a market that is transparent, equitable, and that ensures as much of the money that’s been set aside for research can go towards” that intent.
Debate about APCs is not new, said Eugenie Reich, a Boston-based attorney who is representing Alperin. What is new is identifying a legal claim where the public discussion intersects with the law, she said.
“That discussion has definitely existed, but it’s never, as far as I’m aware, been publicly alleged that this is fraud on the government,” she told us. “I think that’s where publishers have gotten themselves into trouble per the complaint, by using public access policies as a way of increasing charges, knowing that the charges would hit government grants.”
The complaint alleges the publishers have “fixed the market” to make it difficult to publish without paying “prestige prices, luxury prices,” both through market concentration and through copyright terms, Reich added.
“That’s why I think it is important to distinguish between a business that just wants to make money from a luxury good and a business that is knowingly passing such charges through to the government,” she said in an interview.
Reich represented sleuth Sholto David in an FCA action against Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, which settled the case in December 2025 for $15 million. The institute admitted researchers used “misrepresented and/or duplicated” images and data in support of grant applications to the National Institutes of Health. As the relator in the case, David received a portion of the settlement, with the bulk of the amount going back to the federal government.
Reich was also part of the team representing the whistleblower in an FCA case against Biogen, which agreed to pay $900 million to resolve claims the company unlawfully paid kickbacks to physicians. The government also declined to intervene in that case.
John R. Thomas of Hafemann, Magee & Thomas, LLC, in Roanoke, Virginia, the other lawyer representing Alperin, was one of the attorneys in an FCA case against Duke University that resulted in a $112.5 million settlement, nearly $34 million of which went to his brother Joseph, the whistleblower in the case. He has written for Retraction Watch about the act as well as about what whistleblowers should consider in the context of an FCA claim.
A Springer Nature spokesperson said the publisher could not immediately comment on the matter. Wiley and Elsevier declined to comment. Informa did not respond.
FCA attorneys had mixed views of the complaint. Pamela Coyle Brecht, a whistleblower attorney in Philadelphia, called the filing a “niche case” with a “unique theory.”
However, Renée Brooker, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney with Tycko & Zavareei LLP, said the fact the defendants are journal publishers may be “eye-grabbing,” but the legal theories underpinning the case are tried and true in the FCA realm.. A wide swath of qui tam cases involve defendants that did not directly submit the alleged false claims, Brooker said, particularly complaints against the pharmaceutical industry. Such companies are frequently accused of FCA violations, while a pharmacy or doctor’s office unknowingly filed the false claims.
The case is a prime example of parties that don’t directly submit false claims to the government still facing liability, said Eva Gunasekera, a whistleblower attorney at Tycko & Zavareei and former senior counsel for healthcare fraud at the DOJ.
“It’s a great reminder of how broad in scope the False Claims Act is,” she said.
By law, FCA cases are filed under seal to protect whistleblowers and to give the government time to investigate the claims and decide if it wishes to intervene. That the government did not intervene in this case is not surprising, Brooker added.
“It says nothing at all about the merits of the case,” she said. “Over the last 15 years, the relator’s bar [has been] more and more successful with helping the DOJ to litigate declined qui tam cases because DOJ cannot do it all.”
The U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts declined to comment. The DOJ did not respond to a message for comment.
In February, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit that alleged six major publishers violated antitrust law by colluding to “fix the price of peer review services at $0.” Filed by UCLA neuroscientist Lucina Uddin, the case also included Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley as defendants, as well as Sage, Taylor & Francis and Wolters Kluwer.
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