ISTOCK, SEZERYADIGARLast week (November 22), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it won an initial court ruling against OMICS, a publisher of open-access journals. The preliminary injunction stems from a complaint filed in August 2016 by the FTC against OMICS CEO Srinubabu Gedela, and affiliated companies ImedPub and Conference Series, alleging that they published articles without standard peer review, misrepresented numerous scientists as editors, and made multiple deceptive claims towards researchers.
According to the complaint, OMICS did not disclose to researchers that they would have to pay extraordinarily high publishing fees until articles were accepted for publication. The company also failed to disclose that it calculated its journal impact factors in an unorthodox fashion, FTC claims, and falsely stated that its journals are indexed by federal research databases such as the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed and Medline services.
“The defendants in this case used false promises to convince researchers to submit articles presenting work that may have taken months or years to complete, and then held that work hostage over undisclosed publication fees ranging into the thousands of dollars,” Jessica Rich, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, says in a press release. “It ...
