OMICS Group Inc.

Research held hostage after acceptance

OMICS advertised hundreds of online academic journals and international conferences to scientists and medical professionals. The FTC alleged it claimed rigorous peer review and editorial boards of prominent academics, when in reality many articles were published with little to no peer review and many named editors had never agreed to be affiliated.

The mechanism that made this costly is the sequence. OMICS did not tell researchers they would owe significant publishing fees, ranging into the thousands of dollars, until after it had accepted the article. It then often refused to let them withdraw, which matters because academic ethics standards forbid submitting the same research to more than one journal. The work became ineligible for publication anywhere else.

As the FTC’s Bureau Director put it, the defendants convinced researchers to submit work “that may have taken months or years to complete, and then held that work hostage over undisclosed publication fees.”

The other claims

OMICS advertised a high “impact factor,” the standard measure of how often a journal’s articles are cited. The widely accepted version is Thomson Reuters’ proprietary measure. OMICS calculated its own scores and did not clearly disclose that.

It also told researchers its journals were indexed by federal research databases including the NIH’s PubMed and MEDLINE. They were not. The NIH had refused to index them and had demanded the company stop claiming an association.

For its conferences, which charged registration fees over $1,000, it listed prominent researchers as presenters who had not agreed to appear.

The judgment

A federal court in Nevada granted a preliminary injunction in November 2017, and on summary judgment in March 2019 found the defendants violated the FTC Act, entering a judgment of $50.1 million.

The order bars the misrepresentations, requires clear and conspicuous disclosure of all costs of submitting or publishing, and requires express written consent from anyone the defendants represent as associated with their journals or conferences.

The FTC thanked the U.S. National Library of Medicine at the NIH for its assistance.

What is not established

The judgment followed a court’s summary judgment ruling rather than a settlement.