Hearing Highlights Opposition to Trump Publishing Fee Plans

Speakers at a House Science Committee hearing on Wednesday criticized the Trump administration’s plans to implement a government-wide ban on paying to access or publish academic research.

The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2027 budget request, published earlier this month, calls for a “government-wide prohibition on publishing and subscription fees,” adding that the use of federal funds for “expensive subscriptions to academic journals and prohibitively high publishing costs” will only be covered if required by federal statute or approved in advance by a federal agency. The administration justifies the ban by saying that “research funded by taxpayers should be publicly accessible; yet many publications charge the Government to both publish and to access the same research study.”

In her opening statement at the hearing, Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee Ranking Member Emilia Sykes (D-OH) described the Trump administration’s decree for the federal government to stop paying subscription and publishing fees as a “sledgehammer,” when this is “an issue in need of a scalpel.”

“Cutting federal funds for publishing costs is only going to put a further strain on our universities and researchers who are already under attack from this administration,” Sykes said. She argued that “pulling the rug from under the publishing industry carelessly will be a disaster for research integrity,” adding that publishing fees support high publishing standards. Sykes noted, however, that she has doubts over whether the publishing fees that journals charge are fair, praising the work of universities in her state that have negotiated money-saving open access publishing agreements with big academic publishers.

Republicans on the committee did not weigh in on Trump’s prohibition on subscription and publishing fees, but did express dissatisfaction with how the scholarly publishing industry operates. In his opening statement, Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee Chair Rich McCormick (R-GA) said that “what was once a straightforward process of peer review and dissemination has become a complex, commercialized marketplace with misaligned incentives and bad actors willing to exploit them.” McCormick and others speaking at the hearing criticized the “publish or perish” culture of academia, saying it rewards quantity over quality.

Asked by Sykes to comment on the Trump administration’s proposal to stop paying for subscriptions, Carl Maxwell, senior vice president for public policy at the Association of American Publishers, said preventing federally employed scientists from accessing the latest science is “self-defeating.”

“I’m not sure what good it does to tell a NASA scientist or an Oak Ridge scientist, go find it on a public repository, you can’t have a login to Science magazine or Nature magazine,” Maxwell said. Several media outlets reported last year that federal agencies had canceled their subscriptions to some academic journals, including from high-profile publishers such as Springer Nature.

Maxwell also criticized the Trump administration’s proposal to stop paying publishing fees, noting that researchers who perform government-funded research are required to submit the final, post-peer review version of their research publications to the agency that funded them, which typically requires the payment of an article processing charge to the publisher. These charges can run into thousands of dollars for high-profile journals.

“If in the end the author pays a fee to publish, and then has to give the article to the agency, and is not able to pay for that publication out of their grant, it’s like a political science 101 definition of an unfunded mandate,” Maxwell said.

The National Institutes of Health announced last year that it intends to cap the amount it will contribute toward publishing costs for NIH-funded research. FYI has reached out for comment on when the agency plans to announce its new policy. The Trump administration’s budget request for NIH includes $100 million “to elevate replication and reproducibility as a transformative scientific priority through a coordinated, cross-institute approach.” The budget also says NIH will create new platforms for publishing negative results in the National Library of Medicine and “establish benchmarks that define and reward true scientific impact.” The agency will also “restore credibility” to NIH science by implementing “updated public access and limiting allowable publication cost policies.”

Jason Owen-Smith, executive director at the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science at the University of Michigan, said at the hearing that the Trump administration’s proposal would be better if it required transparency in the setting of subscription fees instead of banning them entirely.

Concerns over the rise of AI-generated content, paper mills, China’s mining of published research data, reproducibility, and research misconduct were discussed at length during the hearing. Kate Travis, managing editor of the blog Retraction Watch, told the committee that her publication had tracked a rise in retractions, but that the increase is not necessarily a bad thing. “It means the scientific literature is being cleaned up,” she said. Travis noted, however, that it can be difficult to investigate potential misconduct due to limited access to research data sets, adding that the National Science Foundation has recently lost key personnel charged with conducting investigations into suspected research misconduct. “We need more investigations and more transparency around them,” Travis said.