A trial date has been set in a $1 billion defamation case against Elsevier that alleges the company published what plaintiffs say was a manipulated study about an air purifying technology over objections from peer reviewers. The case has already cost Elsevier a $10,000 sanction from a judge.
Global Plasma Solutions (GPS), which makes air quality products, sued Elsevier in 2022 after the publisher declined to retract a 2021 paper in Building and Environment about GPS’ needlepoint bipolar ionization technology, which it heavily marketed during the COVID-19 pandemic as an air purifier. The complaint claims Elsevier is responsible for the authors’ alleged omission of data and misleading conclusions in the paper that fueled “massive” financial losses for the company, its lawyers claim. Elsevier knew the paper “failed peer review” under its “own standards,” but moved forward with the article despite this knowledge, according to GPS, which now goes by GPS Air.
The complaint has survived a bid by Elsevier to dismiss the case, and a trial has been set for Dec. 7. In allowing the case to proceed, U.S. Magistrate Judge David Keesler said in a May 2024 opinion that GPS has “plausibly alleged actual malice” by Elsevier defined as “knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth.” Chief Judge Martin Reidinger of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina upheld Keesler’s recommendation in July 2025.
A spokesperson for Elsevier told Retraction Watch the company, “strongly refutes the accusations but cannot comment further on an ongoing legal case.”
In its 2022 motion to dismiss the case, attorneys for Elsevier argued editorial decisions for the journal are made by an independent editor and independent scholarly referees, “none of whom is an employee of Elsevier Ltd. or in any way under its control.”
“Yet GPS seeks to hold Elsevier Ltd. liable without even suggesting that the editor or any of the peer reviewers, let alone any of the authors of the article in question, were employees of Elsevier, or otherwise under Elsevier’s control,” attorneys wrote. “There is no legal basis for such liability, and to impose liability would have far-reaching adverse consequences for scholarship.”
Audwin Cash, CEO for GPS Air, told us the case aims to “remove a false scientific article that has misled the public about GPS’s technology.” According to GPS’ complaint, Elsevier has published “numerous articles that are not peer reviewed but that Elsevier advertises as ‘peer reviewed.’” Citing internal and discovery documents, GPS alleges an assessment of 19 journals revealed Elsevier has published more than 1,200 articles either without any peer review, or against the recommendations of the reviewers. The complaint doesn’t provide or cite evidence for that statement, but many documents in the case are under a protective order and not viewable to the public. Attorneys for GPS would not show us evidence for the claim or discuss any of the documents under seal.
“The public should be able to trust scientific publications that claim to be peer reviewed,” Cash said by email. “These publications impact public health decisions and important research. We hope this case will hold scientific publishers accountable and improve the public health and welfare by helping to ensure the reliability of scientific publications for the future.”
GPS launched its needlepoint bipolar ionization technology in 2008. The technology purifies air by injecting positive and negative ions directly into the airflow of ventilation systems, according to the company. In 2020, GPS promoted testing that claimed to show the technology reduced a SARS-CoV-2 surface strain by 99 percent within 30 minutes.
The 2021 paper in Building and Environment appeared to poke holes in these assertions. The study, by Yicheng Zeng, then a Ph.D. student at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and nine others, purportedly showed the ionizer had minimal effect on indoor air quality and posed the risk of generating harmful irritants. Two subsequent class action lawsuits against GPS relied upon the study’s results to levy civil fraud claims against the company. (A judge rejected both class actions.)
A 2022 corrigendum to the Building and Environment paper said two tables in the paper’s supplementary materials were “accidently transposed,” but that the results were not affected.
GPS alleges the study’s corresponding author, Brent Stephens, and his team started with a “desired” conclusion, “suppressing and distorting” evidence that did not fit their narrative. According to a November 2, 2020, email exchange, Zeng sent Stephens test results suggesting the technology was effective, and Stephens replied: “I would just suggest ignoring those bins.” In a later email, Stephens indicated moving forward with the study, writing “our story is strong now.”
Zeng and Stephens are not named as defendants in the suit. Zeng told us the study was led by Stephens, and that he needed to consult with him before commenting about the case.
Stephens, who runs the Built Environment Research Group at Illinois Institute of Technology, did not return our requests for comment. Stephens was a vocal critic of air purification technology during the pandemic, speaking to media outlets and joining an open letter to school districts about the potential negative impacts of electric air cleaning equipment in buildings.
The lawsuit alleges Stephens’ bias stemmed from his alliance with Marwa Zaatari, a former executive of enVerid, a competitor business, and their coordinated effort to disparage GPS and steer customers to competitor products. Emails show Stephens and Zaatari discussed the GPS research, and that Zaatari advised Stephens and his team on subsequent research about GPS. In one email, Stephens thanked Zaatari for her time on “this campaign,” including making reference to a funding commitment for more research.
Zaatari, who also was the first author of the open letter to school districts, did not return a message seeking comment. GPS sued Zaatari and enVerid for defamation in a separate suit that was settled for undisclosed terms.
Following the first study’s publication, attorneys for GPS demanded the journal retract the article. Attorneys informed the journal about the then-pending defamation lawsuit against Zaatari and enVerid and warned the letter served as “five days written notice of the false and defamatory statements” in the article. Under North Carolina law, a plaintiff must give a publisher at least five days notice before suing for libel.
In a Jan. 11, 2022 email, Qingyan “Yan” Chen, the journal’s editor-in-chief and a professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, wrote that GPS was welcome to write a letter to the editor to express its views.
“In terms of your request to retract the paper, I am sorry to inform you that it is impossible after it is published,” Chen wrote. “You can sue Elsevier, the publisher of the journal, if you wish, but you are likely to fail….”
Chen wrote papers in the journal “are peer reviewed” and that “free speech and academic freedom are protected by law.”
GPS claims documents obtained during the litigation showed two of three peer reviewers recommended against publication, according to legal filings. The company also alleges Elsevier made the final decision to name GPS in the study, citing internal emails obtained during discovery. No document in the public court record supports those claims, but it’s not clear if they are among those sealed under a protective order.
In its motion to dismiss, Elsevier defended the study as a “factual report of two experiments” with conclusions that consisted of data and “some opinions about the implications of that data.” GPS, according to the publisher, “picks fights with its methodology,” which is “explained in detail, easily visible to anyone in the narrow community of those with the skill to read the Article.”
“Choosing flawed methodology (even if that were the case, which Elsevier does not concede) is not defamatory in any event,” its attorneys wrote.
Elsevier argued also that GPS is not entitled to a retraction.
“As a matter of First Amendment law, a party claiming to have been defamed has no right to a retraction, for that would amount to compelling speech by the defendant,” Elsevier attorneys wrote. “Imposing liability for failure to retract would have the same serious First Amendment implications.”
The GPS case is “an outlier,” because not many aggrieved companies or entities sue a publisher, as opposed to authors over scientific articles, said Mark Barnes, a partner at Ropes and Gray LLC in Boston who has served as an acting research integrity officer at several U.S. institutions. While internet providers are not generally liable for the content they facilitate and publishers and journals perform a similar function, the latter entities have an increased duty because they select which articles to publish, he told us.
Their process of selection imposes legal and ethical duties “that go beyond that of a common carrier, even though the authors must bear primary responsibility for accuracy of their content.”
Few companies that have sued over scientific articles have been successful. A federal court in 2019 awarded CrossFit $4 million in its lawsuit over a now-retracted study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. Judge Janis L. Sammartino of the U.S. District Court of Southern California ruled the National Strength and Conditioning Association “deceived the public and consumers regarding the safety and effectiveness of CrossFit training,” through the article.
But a North Carolina judge in July, for example, dismissed a defamation suit by the maker of Splenda against a scientist, ruling the research dispute does not belong in court. In 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit threw out a false advertising complaint by a pharmaceutical company against Nature America over a study about its lung treatment. The appeals court ruled “statements of scientific conclusions about unsettled matters of scientific debate cannot give rise to liability for damages sounding in defamation.”
In another case, a pharmaceutical company lost its trade libel lawsuit against the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) over articles in its flagship journal Anesthesiology. As part of its complaint, drug maker Pacira BioSciences demanded the society retract the papers, which the publisher declined. In a 2023 opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit concluded nonfraudulent, peer-reviewed scientific articles are protected opinions. The law firm that represented ASA is the same firm representing Elsevier in the GPS case.
The GPS case is in the discovery phase, which ends Aug. 26. On Monday the court sanctioned Elsevier for making unreasonable discovery requests by asking for additional internal messages that have already been discussed and resolved in the court record, according to U.S. District Judge Kenneth Bell. Bell ordered Elsevier to pay GPS $10,000 over its “unreasonable insistence on seeking discovery without regard to obvious facts and the clear representations of the opposing party.”
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