Herbalife decided to silence scientists who published a study that may put their products in a bad light by first sending bogus claims from their scientists, then when that failed, sent in their lawyers with multiple threats against the journal, and the journal caved and removed access to the study.
As reported by BehindMLM, medical researchers in India had published a research paper detailing their findings of heavy metal in Herbalife products sold in India. At first, Herbalife sent in their own "toxicologists" from Brazil disputing the paper. Science was reviewed by the journal's panel, and found to be correct, and thus, the paper was definitely NOT retracted. However, it appears that Herbalife, realizing it cannot challenge the science of the study, decided to send legal threats to the medical researchers of the study, but also directly to the journal's staff, journal's editorial panel and the publisher, Elsevier.
And despite the editorial panel concluding that there was no cause for retraction as per COPE guidelines, the publisher and the journal pulled the paper ANYWAY, without consent of the authors.
And furthermore, retracted studies are usually kept available for access in order to provide a reference on what not to do. This was not done. The entire study simply disappeared.
Two thoughts on this:
A) Why isn't there an anti-SLAPP equivalent for scientific studies? SLAPP, or "strategic lawsuit against public participation", is a tactic a person or organization is being sued to prevent it from publicizing some information that the public deserves to know. What Herbalife did here is a SLAPP to prevent the study from being publicized.
B) With the high cost being charged by Elsevier to "publish" those journals (we're talking about a couple hundred dollars to read ONE article, sometimes), you'd think Elsevier would actually have a team of lawyers to defend such.
But this cannot stand. It's time to make Herbalife realize they can't get away with this behavior.
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