Some journals charge authors nearly $13,000 per article to make their research publicly accessible.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | GelatoPlus/Getty Images | National Institutes of Health

The National Institutes of Health announced a plan Tuesday to implement a cap on the fees publishers can charge NIH-funded researchers to make their work publicly accessible.

According to NIH officials—who have terminated hundreds of research projects that don’t align with the Trump administration’s ideological views on race, gender and climate, among other topics—capping such fees has the potential both to disrupt the lucrative academic publishing industry and to bolster scientific debate. Open-access advocates applaud the spirit of the policy, though some say its effectiveness will hinge on the details, which are still in the works.

“Creating an open, honest, and transparent research atmosphere is a key part of restoring public trust in public health,” Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH, said in a statement. “This reform will make science accessible not only to the public but also to the broader scientific community, while ending perverse incentives that don’t benefit taxpayers.”

It’s the latest move by the NIH aimed at widening public access to scientific research, coming about a week after the NIH’s new public access policy took effect on July 1. That policy, put forth by former president Joe Biden’s administration, requires federally funded researchers to deposit their work into agency-designated public-access repositories, including the NIH-run PubMed, immediately upon publication. Previously, authors or their publishers had the option to place a 12-month embargo on public access to government-funded research publications.

Both the updated open-access policy and the NIH’s newly announced publisher fee cap, which takes effect next year, are designed to put some limits on the $19 billion for-profit scholarly publishing industry, which is dominated by a small group of for-profit megapublishers, including Elsevier, Taylor & Francis and Springer Nature. The industry thrives on the unpaid work of scholars—including thousands funded by the NIH and other federal agencies—who rely on publishing their research in prestigious journals to earn tenure, promotion and recognition as leaders in their fields.

“I expect the response to this will be that these journals will lose some of their market power,” Bhattacharya told Charlie Kirk, founder of the right-wing group Turning Point USA, in an interview Tuesday. “A lot of their market power has to do with the fact that they bully scientists into paying large fees and essentially end up bullying us.”

His comments echo long-standing criticisms of the publishing industry, which has for decades enriched itself by charging both journal subscription fees and article processing fees.

After a researcher publishes their work in a journal, the publisher sells exclusive access to the content via pricey subscription packages that eat up about 80 percent of academic libraries’ materials budgets. The publishers can then turn a second profit on the same work by charging authors hundreds—or even thousands—of dollars in article processing fees to make their work freely accessible to the public. For example, Nature, which is owned by Springer, charges authors $12,690 to allow open access to a single article.

While grant-funded research typically includes a carve-out for those article processing fees, authors who aren’t grant funded have to come up with the money on their own. And regardless of who’s paying, authors want their work to be publicly accessible because it increases the chances that others will cite it, which is key to building career capital.

Though it’s still unclear what the NIH’s cap on publishers’ fees will be, the agency “is actively reviewing the cost structures associated with research accessibility, particularly allowable publication expenses included in grant budgets,” Bhattacharya said in a statement. “While open access aims to shift costs away from readers, the growing prevalence of unreasonably high article processing charges (APCs) has placed undue financial pressure on researchers and funders.”

Open-access advocates are in favor of reining in for-profit publishers, though some believe the new NIH policy may yield unintended consequences.

Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), which has long advocated for open access, told Inside Higher Ed in an email that “we fully support NIH’s open access goals and are pleased they’re examining publication expenses that may reflect publisher double-dipping.” But she cautioned that “fee caps can easily become price floors, encouraging publishers to raise rates to the cap level and pushing authors toward expensive article processing charges.”

Instead, she said, SPARC encourages the NIH “to strengthen its support for article deposit in repositories—achieving the same laudable public access goals without feeding an already unsustainable pricing system.”

Dave Hansen, executive director of the Authors Alliance, told Inside Higher Ed via email that the “NIH calling out those exorbitant APC fees and refusing to pay for them is mostly a good thing.” He said he’s “hopeful that this NIH move will give a further incentive for publishers, other funders, and researchers to explore alternatives.”

He added, however, that the “the devil is in the details.”

“Setting an APC level too low could also exclude many publishers, including non-profit, mission-driven publishers, that have real publishing costs that must be covered,” Hansen wrote. “A quick pivot on APC funding policy that eliminates those publishing options for authors, or that would force authors and universities to foot the bill themselves, would be a shame.”

The policy announced this week will also make more space for dissenting scientific viewpoints, Bhattacharya said in the interview with Kirk.

“If you allow people to have access to that information and data immediately upon publication, you make it much harder for a small number of scientific elite to say what’s true and false,” he said. “Science is supposed to promote freedom, not suppress it.”

During the pandemic, Bhattacharya, who was a health economist at Stanford University before Trump appointed him director of the NIH, became one of the political right’s favorite examples of how the so-called scientific elite allegedly suppressed nonconformist scientific beliefs. In 2020, he criticized public officials’ recommendations for people to stay home to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 virus, sparking widespread backlash from other experts—including the officials running the NIH at the time.

But now that he’s in charge of the same agency that dismissed his views as “fringe” nearly five years ago, Bhattacharya has vowed to “establish a culture of respect for free speech in science and scientific dissent at the NIH.”

And as he told Kirk, his plan to cap article processing fees is all part of his strategy to achieve that goal.

While “there’s going to have to be some more actions taken,” Bhattacharya said, “the endpoint will be a more democratic science” that allows “people to have real, honest scientific discussions about the data rather than a few big actors dominating the field.”