Trump’s ban on paying open access fees ‘won’t cut costs’

Plans to ban US researchers from spending federal grants on open access fees unless requests are signed off by agency officials will do little to reduce publishing costs, experts have warned.

Under proposed rule changes published by the Office of Management and Budget, all journal publication costs – “including page charges, article processing charges (APCs), or similar fees such as open access fees for professional journal publications and other peer-reviewed publications” – will become “unallowable under federal awards”.

Exceptions would be permitted only if requests are approved in advance for a federal funder “on a case-by-case basis” – a move designed to “strengthen stewardship of federal funds”, say the proposed guidelines, which were published quietly, without notice or a press release, on 29 May.

“Publication costs are not inherently necessary to carry out the core programmatic objectives of most federal awards,” the proposals state, adding that free-to-read publishing is often “discretionary”, will “vary widely in scope and costs, and may serve institutional, professional, or reputational interests rather than the specific objectives of the federal program”.

The proposals – condemned by many scientists as unjustified political interference in US science and the latest salvo in Donald Trump’s “war on science” – come as the National Institutes of Health is considering capping APCs, with limits of between $2,000 and $3,000, or $6,000, among scenarios proposed in July 2025 – far below the publication fees of more than $12,000 (£8,900) charged by many top journals.

The proposed rules come amid growing concern about the rising costs of open access publishing in the US, Asia and Europe, where several funders have withdrawn direct funding to support publication fees in high-cost journals.

The new guidance would “add to an already murky and pressurised environment for libraries and academic publishing in general”, said Emma Wood, scholarly communication librarian at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, given the federal requirement to make publicly funded research freely available under the 2022 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memorandum.

“If federal funders step away from financial support of open access (OA) but require publicly available results, the OA fees won’t drop but the visibility of quality content from underfunded researchers will,” said Wood.

On whether publication fees “serve institutional, professional or reputational interests rather than the specific objectives of the federal program”, Wood said it was reasonable to think that publication fees for some journals had become “premium upgrades”.

However, the guidelines risked “pricing out researchers with less institutional financial support” who could not afford to aim for the more prestigious publications, she explained.

“Most researchers (and institutions) will continue to prioritise factors like scope and reputation in journal selection, so those with funding constraints will do the minimum to meet OA directives such as leaning on green open access while researchers with greater means will have more OA options when publishing in the same journals,” Wood said.

Rick Anderson, librarian at Brigham Young University-Provo, said the guidance failed to recognise the high-cost nature of publishing in certain disciplines, with open access fee caps likely to lead to price increases in other areas of publishing.

“Open access has always been difficult, for the simple reason that making expensive things available for free on an unlimited basis is always difficult, and the work that goes into turning research results into usable scholarly products is expensive,” said Anderson.

The latest proposals were, he continued, “another manifestation of the ongoing conflict between the desire to make high-quality content available to the public at no charge, and the fact that turning research results into high-quality content is an expensive proposition – for some disciplines, a very​ expensive proposition”.

“You can move the cost around, shifting it from readers to authors to funders to academic institutions, but you can never make the cost disappear, and the cost always lands on someone who thinks someone else ought to bear it. Even repository-based green open access is far from free: look at the economic challenges the arXiv has been experiencing, for example,” Anderson said.

“The old saying ‘Fast, cheap or high-quality: pick two’ really applies to scholarly communication. All the slogans and manifestos and calls for new forms of publication in the world are not going to overcome the fact that when work is done, someone pays for it; and when high-quality work is done, someone is paying more,” Anderson explained.

“Once the research has been completed, there’s still expensive work to do in turning the results into a usable product, maintaining an ongoing archive of those results and making the results findable.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com