A False Claims Act case against Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Informa is now unsealed

A lawsuit brought under the False Claims Act against four of the largest scholarly publishers is now on the public record. Retraction Watch reported on 31 July 2026 that the case, brought by Juan Pablo Alperin, an associate professor at Simon Fraser University and a co director of its Scholarly Communications Lab, was filed under seal in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts and unsealed on 30 July 2026. The defendants are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Informa, the parent of Taylor and Francis. Alperin is represented by Eugenie Reich, a Boston lawyer whose firm's website says its principal has served on teams that recovered more than US$945 million through False Claims Act and other actions, and by John R. Thomas of Hafemann, Magee and Thomas in Roanoke, Virginia.

The amended complaint is posted on Reich's website. Every page carries the court stamp Case 1:24-cv-10603-ADB, Document 29, Filed 07/23/26, and the filing runs to 71 pages. The docket number is consistent with an original 2024 filing, matching the account that the case sat under seal for more than two years while the government decided whether to intervene, which is the ordinary course for a qui tam action. The copy on the firm's site is a scan rather than searchable text, so the figures below are as reported by Retraction Watch from the pleading.

On that account, the complaint alleges a decade long scheme in which article processing charges, the fees authors pay to make a paper open access, were set at up to ten times the cost of processing. It places the actual cost at US$200 to US$1,000 an article against charges running from hundreds of dollars to more than US$10,000, and alleges the fees were ultimately reimbursed from federal research grants. It further alleges the publishers discussed among themselves how to shield the viability of free open access options. Springer Nature said it could not comment immediately, Wiley and Elsevier declined to comment, and Informa did not respond.

None of that has been tested. A qui tam complaint is one side's pleading, the United States has not been reported as having intervened, and no defence has been filed on the public record reviewed for this article.

What is independently documented is the cost the complaint is aimed at. The US Government Accountability Office published a report on 21 May 2026, GAO-26-107738, titled Federal Research: Agencies Should Better Manage Anticipated Publishing Cost Increases Amid Shift to Public Access. It examines the consequences of the 2022 Office of Science and Technology Policy directive requiring federally funded research to be made freely available, estimates that publishing fees could cost the government up to US$1 billion a year, and finds that of the agencies reviewed only the National Institutes of Health had developed a plan to manage the increase. Seven of nine agencies had updated their public access policies and five did not fully align with federal guidance, particularly on reuse rights. GAO made 11 recommendations.

SPARC, the open access advocacy coalition, responded on 22 May 2026 and put figures alongside the audit: it says federal agencies paid an estimated US$295 million in publishing charges in 2024 and that costs could reach US$3 billion to US$4.5 billion between 2026 and 2030 on current trends. In comments to the Office of Management and Budget on 15 July 2026, SPARC argued the core premise is avoidable, contending that depositing a final accepted manuscript in an agency designated repository satisfies public access requirements at zero cost and that the federal purpose licence already gives the government royalty free rights to reproduce and distribute the work. SPARC also quotes the GAO report as finding there is currently no practical way for researchers to have work peer reviewed without paying a publication charge, and citing paper mills targeting open access journals and one major publisher retracting more than 11,000 articles.

The pressure is not only litigation. Retraction Watch reported on 23 July 2026 that 41 editors and board members of the Review of Social Economy resigned in July, four coeditors on 4 July and 37 others on 10 July, after the Association for Social Economics renewed its contract with Taylor and Francis. Roberto Veneziani of Queen Mary University of London said the publisher had made clear it was only a matter of time before the hybrid journal became fully open access with author fees. The departing editors wrote that they had used a considerable part of the editorial budget buying articles out from behind the paywall, especially for young scholars and scholars from outside the OECD. They plan a new title with Stanford University Press.

What happens next is unknown: whether the Department of Justice intervenes, whether the case survives a motion to dismiss, and whether the publishers' cost figures, which the complaint disputes, will ever be put into evidence.