Scholarly Publishing Costs Under Scrutiny by Trump Administration
The Health Sciences Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Selena N. B. H. via Flickr / CC BY 2.0
Several documents released as part of the Trump administration’s fiscal year 2027 budget proposal contain statements about scholarly publishing that, if enacted, could have significant ramifications for publishers, research institutions, and academics.
The president’s budget request calls for a government-wide prohibition on using federal funds to pay for “expensive subscriptions to academic journals and prohibitively high publishing costs unless required by federal statute or approved in advance by a federal agency,” a major potential policy shift that has raised concern among House Democrats. Currently, the federal government allows recipients of research grants to use part of their funding to cover open-access publishing fees, though the amount varies by agency.
Some agency-level budget request documents released by the Trump administration also address journal subscription costs and open-access publishing fees. NASA’s budget request says that “in accordance with administration policy announced in the budget,” the agency will no longer use federal funds to pay for academic journals or publish research results. “This policy preserves funds to support actual research by ensuring that the American taxpayer does not pay for the research, publishing, and access to that research, essentially triple charging the public for the same product,” the document says.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s budget request also says it will no longer use federal funding to pay for journal subscriptions or publication fees, adding that NIST-funded researchers “will continue to have access to journals and publications necessary to conduct research through existing institutional arrangements and other non-federal sources.”
The National Institutes of Health is currently weighing how much it is willing to spend on open-access publishing fees. In July 2025, NIH announced it was developing proposals to limit allowable publication costs in order to maximize funds for research. The agency presented and has received public comment on several options for capping publishing fee contributions — including eliminating contributions altogether. NIH plans to “release a policy in 2026,” according to its recent budget justification. An analysis by consulting firm Delta Think, published last week, suggests that capping allowable publishing fees at NIH would have a negative impact globally on open-access publishing due to NIH’s large scale and spending power, especially when combined with proposed research funding cuts.
Repealing the Nelson Memo
In 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a policy known as the Nelson memo, which required all federal agencies to develop plans by the end of 2025 to support the open publication of federally funded research without any embargo period. SPARC, a nonprofit supporting open-access publishing, maintains a tracker that shows most federal agencies have now developed and implemented policies in line with the Nelson memo.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its policy just last month, and it includes a provision that says that USDA-supported scholarly publications should not be published in “journals using predatory practices or whose publisher has editorial offices managed, owned, controlled, or physically or virtually located in, or operated out of, a foreign country of concern” — a potential blow to major scholarly publishers that maintain offices in China. The provision has not been implemented by other agencies and could be an extension of the USDA’s America First policy, according to the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers.
The Nelson memo states that agencies should allow grant applicants to include “reasonable” publication and data management costs as allowable expenses in their research budgets, but that now appears to be at odds with the Trump administration’s stance. While the Trump administration’s statements appear to show continued support for the goal of making federally funded research free for the public to read, they also indicate a desire to reduce federal spending on open-access publishing fees and journal subscriptions, with authors presumably encouraged to find alternative sources of funds to cover publishing costs or exercise free publishing options. The president’s budget request states that there are “numerous low-cost outlets to make federally-funded research publicly available.”
OSTP is now apparently in the process of repealing the Nelson memo, though what that will mean for existing federal open-access publishing policies is unclear. OSTP did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication. When Congress passed its 2026 appropriations minibus in January, a joint explanatory statement accompanying the budget asked OSTP to report on the status of its “process of repealing” the Nelson memo. A report accompanying the House Appropriations Committee’s recently published Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill for fiscal year 2027 says that the committee “recognizes that OSTP is in the process of repealing” the memo, and requests a briefing on this action. The committee also requested that the National Science Foundation “pause implementation of new public access policies” until OSTP has had time to repeal the memo, citing concern that NSF is continuing to “implement public access policies without administration guidance and coordination.”
Congress has repeatedly raised concerns about the cost of implementing the Nelson memo in recent years and has requested several reports from the OSTP on how much the federal government spends on open-access publishing. OSTP estimated in 2022 that open-access publishing costs covered by American taxpayers range from $390 million to $789 million annually.
Disclosure: FYI is a publication of the American Institute of Physics, a non-profit federation of scientific societies. AIP is partially supported by revenue generated from AIP Publishing, a wholly owned but independently operated subsidiary that produces scientific journals.
