NIH Poised to Regulate APCs

Yesterday, what we knew was coming landed, and the NIH issued what they called a “Request for Information on Maximizing Research Funds by Limiting Allowable Publishing Costs.” And while it’s tempting to get into the weeds right away, I think it’s important to talk about some contextual elements first:

• NIH grants are generally not regulated at the line-item level. Grant recipients aren’t told what proportion of their grants they can spend on lab assistants, reagents, software, or meetings. Dictating what they can spend with a vendor class appears to be a new and specific bit of meddling in NIH grant funding — and it’s meddling in an area where the Constitution has an opinion (see below).
• This Administration is redolent with media personalities. From RFK Jr. to Dan Bongino to Kash Patel to Kristi Noem to Donald Trump, this Administration was made by media and from media. Therefore, it’s no surprise they would focus on the media aspects of science, and that means publishing.
  • They also have thrived attacking “mainstream media,” so it’s no surprise they would reflexively attack mainstream journals once installed in the scientific research system — via “gaslight journals,” weird edicts, journal subscription cancellations, and mangled lines of attack ingested hastily from OA diatribes they happened across.
• The APC spend from NIH grants is <1% of total direct costs. If I told you that the cost of APCs for publication of NIH studies across a host of scientific journals amounted to less than 1% of grant funding — and direct costs, not factoring in overheads — would you think publishers were efficient? Or exploitative?
  • Let that sink in — all this fuss over the cost of publishing research results from government-funded studies boils down to less than 1% of the direct costs (so, grants less ~30%) of research funding.