\n<\/p>\n
Rachael Sirianni is one of the thousands of research scientists whose work has been decimated by the Trump administration\u2019s massive cuts to the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies. <\/p>\n
\u201cMy lab is crumbling,\u201d said the pediatric brain cancer researcher, who works at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. \u201cOver the course of the last eight months, I’ve had to shutter more than half of my research program.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the same time, she has a backlog of papers she\u2019s still trying to get published in journals that are the best fit for her research and career, including several that charge thousands in fees to make the paper free to access. And if she wants her work to comply with a new NIH policy to expedite public access to federally funded research\u2014part of the agency\u2019s effort to restore trust in science, it says\u2014she may have to start paying even more.<\/p>\n
The 2024 Public Access Policy, which took effect July 1, requires federally funded researchers to deposit their accepted peer-reviewed article manuscript into an open-access repository, such as the NIH-managed PubMed Central, immediately after a journal accepts it for publication. But researchers are reporting that some journals, including at least several high-impact titles owned by Elsevier, Wiley and Springer\u2014are charging authors anywhere from $2,000 to more than $10,000 in article processing charges (APCs) to make their work immediately accessible. <\/p>\n
While researchers can use their NIH grants to pay for APCs, that\u2019s hard for some to justify in such a precarious funding environment. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf I had full access to the institutional dollars that normally support my research program, or if I really believed that that grant that scored well is eventually going to get funded, I could risk my research dollars on these open-access fees,\u201d Sirianni said. \u201cBut because of the trauma that the Trump administration is imposing on scientists across the country, we are faced with impossible decisions. Do we dedicate our money to the experiments? Do we maintain our research personnel? Do we comply with open-access fees?\u201d<\/p>\n
Open-access advocates and experts say that predicament is exposing the limits of the government\u2019s ability to rein in the $19\u00a0billion scholarly publishing industry, which is fueled by academic incentive structures that reward researchers for publishing frequently in widely cited, prestigious journals. Meanwhile, the publishing industry\u2014which has long opposed immediate open access in part because it threatens subscription-dependent business models\u2014says the rollout of the policy gives them no choice but to charge APCs. <\/p>\n
The 2024 policy replaces the 2008 Public Access Policy, which allowed publishers to embargo new peer-reviewed federally funded research articles for 12 months before making them publicly available. That embargo period allowed publishers to turn a profit from selling academic libraries subscriptions to exclusive content; authors who wanted to make their papers publicly accessible before the embargo was lifted typically paid an APC. <\/p>\n
The government\u2019s goal in lifting the embargo was to promote \u201cequity and advance the work of restoring the public\u2019s trust in Government science, and to advance American scientific leadership,\u201d Alondra Nelson, the former acting director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in a 2022 memo bearing her name. \u201cA federal public access policy consistent with our values of equal opportunity must allow for broad and expeditious sharing of federally funded research\u2014and must allow all Americans to benefit from the returns on our research and development investments without delay.\u201d <\/p>\n
Although the Biden administration finalized the policy, the Trump administration is carrying it forward. It was set to take effect across federal agencies on Dec. 31, but NIH director Jay Bhattacharya announced in April that he was implementing it six months ahead of schedule to promote \u201cmaximum transparency.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although Sirianni supports the spirit of NIH\u2019s new open-access policy, she\u2019s worried that high APCs will deter researchers from submitting their work to influential journals that might otherwise be a good fit, to the detriment of the scientific literature. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s absolutely going to be a lot of work that doesn\u2019t get published or gets published in the wrong journal,\u201d Sirianni said. \u201cThis policy is harming scientists. Instead of ensuring that research dollars are invested in providing knowledge to the scientific community and to the public, those dollars will be spent on feeding giant publishing corporations more money.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, publishers say the NIH\u2019s zero-embargo policy is forcing them to recoup lost subscription revenue through APCs to sustain operational costs, including article selection, curation, peer and editorial review, publication, archiving, and maintenance. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe are unable to support approaches that aim to make subscription articles immediately and freely available, which are not sustainable in the long term given they undermine the subscription model on which they depend,\u201d an Elsevier spokesperson said in an email to Inside Higher Ed<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cThe best method for addressing issues of cost in publication is through a vibrant, competitive, and dynamic publishing marketplace with maximum author choice, including fee-based public access and read-and-publish agreements,\u201d Carl Maxwell, senior vice president of public policy for the Association of American Publishers, who lobbied against the zero-embargo policy, wrote in an email. \u201cWe don\u2019t think it\u2019s a good idea to compel researchers to use a one-size-fits-all open access business model that has the potential to require NIH-funded researchers to pay out of pocket to fund the peer review process, in some cases harming their ability to communicate their research results to the scientific community and the general public.\u201d<\/p>\n Caroline Sutton, CEO for the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, added that researchers\u2019 frustration with the NIH\u2019s new open-access policy \u201creveals one of the real human impacts of well-intentioned policies that do not fully consider the operational realities of the research ecosystem.\u201d<\/p>\n It also raises long-standing questions about how to sustain that ecosystem. <\/p>\n \u201cShould the responsibility for funding this work lie with the funder? With the research or institutional library? Should publishers not be compensated?\u201d she wrote in an email. \u201cAnd how can the critical system of checks and balances\u2014which must be resourced\u2014endure if it is not sustainably funded?\u201d<\/p>\n But another sector sustaining the scientific publishing industry is the faculty who produce and peer review research for little to no financial compensation. The most productive are often rewarded instead with tenure, promotion and cachet. <\/p>\n While the NIH policy doesn\u2019t require authors to publish in journals that charge APCs\u2014plenty of reputable, fully open-access journals exist\u2014researchers say where they publish matters to their careers. At most universities, frequently publishing research in prestigious, high-impact journals\u2014including many with hefty APCs\u2014carries more weight with tenure and review committees than publishing in more obscure journals.<\/p>\n But researchers aren\u2019t always clear on a journal\u2019s APC guidelines until they get through the review process and are asked to pay open-access fees to comply with the NIH policy, Rachel Widome, a public health professor at the University of Minnesota, told Inside Higher Ed<\/em>. She withdrew an article from the Elsevier-owned Sleep Health <\/em>on how school start times impact adolescents after she realized she\u2019d have to pay a $2,500 fee to upload her accepted manuscript to PubMed Central in compliance with NIH policy. <\/p>\n \u201cWhen that happens, they\u2019re holding your article hostage,\u201d she said. \u201cDo you start from scratch and submit it to a new journal? It can take six to nine months to go through another review.\u201d <\/p>\n She ended up resubmitting the article to Sleep Health<\/em> after her NIH grant ended, exempting her from the zero-embargo policy. Although \u201ctime has been wasted,\u201d she said the APCs stand to hurt early-career scientists the most. \u201cIt\u2019s so critical that they establish a publication record,\u201d Widome said. \u201cIf the options of which journals they can submit to are really limited [because of APCs], that hurts their chances of getting her research out and launching her career.\u201d<\/p>\n But those academic incentive structures have also emboldened publishers to levy APCs in response to the NIH\u2019s zero-embargo policy, said Dave Hansen, executive director of the Authors Alliance, a California-based nonprofit that supports authors in disseminating their work. <\/p>\n \u201cSo much of the system is wrapped around valuing prestige journals that are published by some of these bigger commercial publishers. That\u2019s really hard for even a big institution like the NIH to nudge researchers away from,\u201d Hansen said, adding that the NIH could de-emphasize prestige factors when evaluating researchers. At the same time, \u201ca lot of publishers recognize that there\u2019s a massive amount of federal funding that they can now demand access to because of this new federal policy.\u201d<\/p>\n The zero-embargo policy isn\u2019t the NIH\u2019s only attempt to regulate the scientific publishing industry. This summer, Bhattacharya proposed capping APCs to weaken the market power of publishers, dilute the scientific elite and \u201cmake science accessible not only to the public but also to the broader scientific community, while ending perverse incentives that don\u2019t benefit taxpayers,\u201d he said. But critics say the plan is neither comprehensive enough to dismantle academic incentive structures, nor likely to substantially lower APCs. <\/p>\n And the frustration researchers are experiencing in the early days of the NIH\u2019s new zero-embargo access policy\u2014which was crafted with some of the same goals as the NIH\u2019s proposed APC caps\u2014is already offering support for those predictions. <\/p>\n \u201cThe NIH public-access policy applies to a vast amount of research, but it\u2019s also just a percentage of the overall landscape. There are a number of players here, including the funders, researchers, institutions, publishers and libraries,\u201d said Katie Funk, former program manager for PubMed Central, who helped develop the zero-embargo policy. <\/p>\n \u201cWithout addressing the whole system, it just causes confusion,\u201d she added. \u201cLarger conversations need to be had about the costs of publishing. It\u2019s not transparent and it\u2019s pervading the whole system.\u201d<\/p>\n (This article has been updated to correct the name of the UMass medical school.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rachael Sirianni is one of the thousands of research scientists whose work has been decimated by the Trump administration\u2019s massive cuts to the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies. \u201cMy lab is crumbling,\u201d said the pediatric brain cancer researcher, who works at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. \u201cOver the course of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36321,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[433,8593,405,328,5265],"class_list":{"0":"post-36320","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-holding","9":"tag-hostage","10":"tag-nih","11":"tag-policy","12":"tag-researchers"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/36321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Holding Articles \u2018Hostage\u2019<\/h2>\n
\u2018Valuing Prestige\u2019<\/h2>\n