"Policy to be implemented next year drew more than 900 comments, most of them critical"
"Sometime next year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will announce new limits on how much funding grantees can spend on publication fees to make their articles open access, or free to read. The agency says it aims to reduce “unreasonably high” article-processing charges (APCs), a goal many researchers embrace. But public comments released last week from more than 900 researchers, academic institutions, and publishers reveal deep concerns about a proposal that one commenter, radiologist Geoffrey Young at Mass General Brigham, calls “well-intentioned, but misguided.”
In its 30 July request for public comment, NIH wrote that paying high APCs—up to $12,690 per paper, at Nature—lessens the funds available for research activities. But many respondents say the proposed APC caps, which range from $2000 to $6000, fail to address deeper problems in the scientific publishing industry and could inequitably block some researchers from publishing in prestigious journals, potentially hurting their chance of being hired or winning a grant or promotion. “The battle should be fought between the NIH and publishers, not using scientists as intermediaries,” writes one anonymous early-career researcher. “Publication costs are too high, but the cost to publish is out of our hands.”
Commenters also say the proposed APC limits appear to conflict with the agency’s “zero-embargo” mandate, which requires researchers who receive federal funding to make their work publicly available upon publication. The proposed policy “appears to be putting investigators in an impossible position,” writes James Gold, a schizophrenia researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Although scientists can technically fulfill this requirement by submitting a version of their paper that has been accepted by a journal but not yet formatted or copy edited to an NIH-approved repository, some high-profile publishers have adopted policies specifically barring authors from doing so."
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