“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.”
Global Plasma Solutions is suing over a 2021 paper in Building and Environment and the trial starts December 7. The interesting claim is not the billion dollars, it is that peer reviewers objected and Elsevier published anyway. A billion dollar exposure teaches every publisher that retracting or publishing critical work carries legal risk. That chills exactly the papers that matter.