"Other publishing proposals would scrap reimbursements or pay peer reviewers, unprecedented steps for a major government funder"
"In a move that could shake up scientific publishing, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) last week proposed specific limits on how much it would reimburse grantees who pay publishers to make their articles open access, or free to read. The suggested limits, which include possible caps of $2000 to $6000 per paper, may block scientists from publishing in top-tier journals with much higher fees, unless they or their institution come up with the difference.
The 30 July proposal, published as an NIH notice, fleshes out a plan announced last month by NIH Director Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya to limit the government’s bill for making articles open access. “The growing prevalence of unreasonably high article processing charges (APCs) has placed undue financial pressure on researchers and funders,” he said in an 8 July statement, complaining that fees of “as much as $13,000 per article” force taxpayers to pay to access research findings already funded through government grants. In a recent interview, Bhattacharya accused publishers of “bullying” scientists to pay exorbitant fees.
An NIH-mandated cap on APC reimbursements would be the first adopted by any large national science funding agency globally, says Christopher Steven Marcum, a consultant who as a White House official during former President Joe Biden’s administration helped write guidance on public access to federally funded scientific papers and data. The Biden policy asked agencies to require grantees to post this content in public repositories upon publication, an approach that replaced a U.S. policy allowing a delay of up to 12 months before making a paper freely available."
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