End the false choice of expensive research fees

For years, the fight over public access to federally funded research has circled back to a false choice: if taxpayers want access to the science they fund, they have to pay publishers to get it. That choice is now colliding with the Office of Management and Budget’s rewrite of the government-wide grants rulebook, which would make publication costs unallowable across nearly every federal agency. This opens a real opportunity to say plainly what the biggest commercial publishers have spent decades obscuring: publisher fees are not required to ensure public access in the first place.

The Government Accountability Office’s recent report on federal research publishing costs documents an $ 11 billion market dominated by a handful of commercial publishers who have converted a bipartisan policy designed to benefit the public into a lucrative new revenue stream, levying Article Processing Charges (APCs). APCs will cost federal agencies and individual researchers billions more over the coming years. The report treats this as unavoidable — concluding there is “no practical way” for federally funded researchers to comply without incurring the charge.

That conclusion is wrong. The policy requires only that articles reporting on taxpayer funded research be made immediately available to the public by putting a copy in a federally designated repository for the public to freely access and fully use. An author can satisfy the policy at zero cost simply by following this guidance.

APCs pay for a different product: a version of the articles carrying a publisher’s brand and the potential perception of prestige. For some authors, that may be worth paying for; however, it isn’t what the mandate asks for, and publishers shouldn’t be allowed to conflate the two.

APCs (which can cost over $12,000 per article) don’t reflect the actual cost of the services publishers provide. The largest academic publishers routinely report profit margins of 30-40 percent — well above the average S&P 500 company. APCs, drawn substantially from public research funds, subsidize these profit margins.

A system that pays publishers per article produces exactly what you’d expect: a market that drives volume over quality. The GAO report found paper mills churning out fraudulent submissions, editorial boards resigning over the pressure to prioritize quantity over quality, and one major publisher retracting more than 11,000 articles after systemic fraud tied to its APC model. That’s the clear impact of the “pay-to-publish” model in practice.

It’s past time to put an end to this false narrative that paying publishers is the only route to public access, and to make explicit what should have been clear all along: there is no cost to comply with a public access mandate. Authors can freely deposit articles into federal repositories, and no agency should treat an APC as something researchers need help affording rather than a discretionary purchase they’re free to decline paying for.

The Office of Management and Budget can make that clarity binding by explicitly stating that depositing a manuscript in a repository at no cost fully satisfies the government’s public access requirement, and directing agencies to issue clear guidance on the no-cost deposit pathways already available. A rule that bars agencies from paying APCs but says nothing about what researchers should do instead just pushes the same confusion downstream.

The federal government’s obligation is not to protect commercial publishers or their margins. It is to ensure that the public, having paid for research once through taxes, isn’t asked to pay again to read it. It is time for those with influence over federal science funding to see this for what it is, and stop playing along.

Heather Joseph is executive director of Specially Adapted Resource Centers (SPARC).