“Making Your Research Free May Cost You”

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Stephanie Lee writes:

Stephanie Rolin, a mental-health services researcher, found out last month that a journal had accepted her latest paper for publication. But there was an asterisk. Community Mental Health Journal was requiring her to fork over about $4,400 — a fee that she hadn’t budgeted for, and one she says she cannot afford. . . .

Most studies appear in paywalled journals, and critics have long contended that those paywalls enrich publishers while gatekeeping taxpayers from the research they fund. The NIH has been pushing for more openness in the ecosystem into which it pours nearly $48 billion annually, and its biggest move yet took effect on July 1. Under a policy that was approved by the Biden administration to take effect at the end of 2025, and moved up six months by the Trump administration, all agency-funded research must now be made freely and immediately available. The previous policy had allowed papers to stay paywalled for up to a year.

But since July 1, some publishers have only given researchers one way to comply with the NIH’s mandate: paying fees that were previously optional. In a year when federal funding has been exceptionally unreliable, scientists say they are stressed about spending thousands of grant dollars on unexpected and questionable open-access charges.

Things don’t have to be this way, open-science experts say: These fees are imposed entirely by publishers. The most prominent examples are Springer Nature and Elsevier, for-profit enterprises that generate billions in revenue. . . .

When Rolin submitted to Community Mental Health Journal earlier this year, she expected the process to go as it had when she’d published in its pages before. At the time, Springer Nature — which sets policies for the 3,000-plus journals under its umbrella — gave NIH-funded authors a “hybrid” of two choices. They could pay an open-access fee to make their study available right away. Or, for free, they could put their paper behind the journal’s paywall while preparing a second copy that was identical save for formatting changes and copy edits. Within 12 months of journal publication, this author’s version would become openly available on a federal database called PubMed Central, in line with a 2008-era NIH requirement. . . .

In late July, Community Mental Health Journal hit Rolin with a $4,390 bill for article-processing charges. Springer Nature’s website now explains that publishing behind a paywall is “not a viable option” for authors like her because it “conflicts with immediate public access policies, such as NIH’s policy.” . . .

Rolin said she’d been aware that the NIH policy was forthcoming, but was surprised by Springer Nature’s hard-line interpretation. Similarly, Elsevier’s terms and conditions for putting studies on PubMed Central list options that involve either author-paid fees or delayed embargoes that wouldn’t comply with the NIH’s mandate. A page describing how NIH-funded authors can “comply with NIH’s public access requirements” has been deleted. . . .

Not every publisher is responding in kind. The JAMA journals, published by the American Medical Association, say that immediately after publication, authors can post their accepted manuscript in a repository of their choice. . . .

But Springer Nature and Elsevier aren’t the only ones reacting to the NIH’s mandate this way. Melanie J. Scott, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh, had a paper accepted in August by the Journal of Leukocyte Biology, which is published by the Society for Leukocyte Biology and Oxford University Press. . . .

In the meantime, researchers will have to figure out how to foot the bill. . . .

Now I’m wondering exactly what is the government policy. I’d think it would be fine to post the paper on a preprint server such as Arxiv, then it doesn’t matter what’s happening with the journals, right?

The funny thing is, this happened to me just the other day, with this article, I think it was, which is indeed published at a Springer journal. Fortunately for me, this research was not NIH-funded so I did not need to pay, nor did I need to withdraw my submission from the journal. I can’t remember how much they wanted to charge me because I was never going to pay. Maybe $2K? And Theory and Society is not a major journal! I like Theory and Society–I’ve published two papers there in the past year–; I’m just saying that it’s wack to ask someone to pay $2K to publish there.

P.S. It’s good to see a government policy that was pushed by both the Biden and Trump administrations so we can talk about it without getting into a political tangle.

27 thoughts on ““Making Your Research Free May Cost You””

  1. The fact that both the Biden and Trump administrations pushed for this policy does not make it any better. Honest to God, I am not sure what either of these administrations thought would happen. Did they think the publishing industry would make open access free (or at least very cheap)? This policy is basically a subsidy for the academic publishing industry because certain research now has to be published in a ‘premium’ way. That money is taken from funds otherwise used for research. This is not a complicated mechanism!

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        • For my most recent manuscript I read some research concerning pre-registration and related proposals and projects. One of which a paper by Soderberg et al. (2021) about the “quality” of Registered Reports (which Higgs & Gelman 2021 commented on). The Soderberg et al. (2021) paper has some additional information on it about things like “competing interests”, “author contributions”, “acknowledgements” which include some information about funding, etc. I am not sure if, and how, this kind of information is present in a possible associated pre-print of the paper, but it has been useful information concerning my manuscript, and I think it can be considered to be a part of the total information of a paper or study that is included in the final published paper that could, and should, be available to members of the public or scientists without access to pay-walled papers. That might be something to considered in light of access to the official paper or merely access to an associated pre-print.

          More generally, I can also imagine that merely making a pre-print available and not the final published paper might possibly add to difficulties and confusion because there might be different kinds of pre-prints which may be hard to keep track of concerning validity or usage. It seems to me that sometimes there are multiple versions of a pre-print, which makes it hard to keep track of things sometimes. Or a pre-print is sometimes posted without it being associated with a final published paper. Or perhaps a pre-print is posted 1 year after the associated paper has been published, and another time it is posted immediately when the associated official paper is published. And maybe when a pre-print is referred to, it might be seen by some as “just” a pre-print and “not peer-reviewed”, etc. I don’t know exactly how clear and consistent the posting of a pre-print associated with a published paper might work in practice, but I think merely requiring posting a pre-print and not provide access to the official paper might lead to unclarity and difficulties in several ways because of the possible different ways pre-prints in general might be used and seen.

    • “That money is taken from funds otherwise used for research”

      Or taken from funds otherwise used for traveling abroad to go to fancy conferences?
      Or taken from funds otherwise used to pay university administrators?
      Or taken from funds otherwise used to pay the bonuses of professors that rake in the grant money?
      Or taken from funds otherwise used to pay the electricity bills of the university so they can let thousands of students pay lots of money for an education that may be poor quality and of little use and may put lots of people in debt?

      Anyway, one step at a time perhaps. It seems an important step to me to let tax payers and members of the general public have access to the complete final product, and the same information (so not merely a pre-print), scientists or decision makers can access.

      Let’s see what that possible first step might lead to…

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  2. It has always been objectively ridiculous that taxpayer-funded research could not be read by those very same taxpayers without paying a fee to a private company. Maybe that’s why Biden and Trump both went along.

    The absurdity reached its zenith in the early years of the IPCC, when citizens could read a summation of the science describing the existential crisis facing mankind in the form of the IPCC report, but nearly all the government-funded papers behind the summary were behind a paywall.

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  3. I recently published in Theory and Society too, but only after I heard about the mass resignation of its editors. I feel sort of like a scab.

    Anyway, aside from its other downsides, charging an arm and a leg for open access intensifies the two-tier structure of research. If you’re at a research-supporting institution you can get professional artwork for your figures, travel money to present your work to qualified audiences, and now open access ransom payments. If you’re from an institution without little buckets of research money lying about, good luck.

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    • Peter:

      I hadn’t heard about the event with the Theory and Society editors. That said, I’d never known about Theory and Society at all . . . I can’t remember why I ended up submitting an article there in the first place. I must have read some other article in the journal? I had a smooth experience with the first article that I published there, so I sent another paper there too.

      The whole publish-in-a-journal thing is so weird! I have no idea who would read my papers in Theory and Society, or in any other journal. Except Jama. I do know that people read Jama, because recently I published a paper there, and then I ran into someone I know on the street and he told me he liked my Jama article. I don’t think that’s ever going to happen with most of the other 182 journals I’ve published in. It kind of feels like I’m shouting in the dark.

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  4. I tried to get my critique of Christakis and Fowler’s studies on contagion of obesity, etc., published in JAMA. The reply from them said, “I am very sorry, but JAMA does not publish already published papers.” That referred to the fact that I had put a preprint on the arXiv.

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    • Correction: At the time I tried JAMA, I had not yet posted the preprint on arXiv, but I had posted it on my own homepage. The JAMA editor said that it would not matter whether I removed it from my homepage; the article was still “out there”.

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      • In the old days, the rationale for the “Ingelfinger Rule” at JAMA and NEJM and similar was that doctors should see the medical news in the journal before their patients saw it in the newspapers. Given that most papers aren’t newsworthy and that a lot of the newsworthy ones get reported as conference presentations (which the journals allow), it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense now.

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    • No one will use the “social layer.” bioRxiv allows comments, and no one ever leaves comments. As an exercise, one can sample a bunch of articles and see! (I’ve commented a few times, out of many hundreds of papers read, for reasons I can’t explain even to myself…)

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      • Raghu, the thing is these comments are specific to BioRXive right? Whereas for example ActivityPub based comments (a competitive tech to Bluesky) interoperates across all Fediverse applications. For example WordPress blogs can federate their comments, and Mastodon (short form blog), and Pixelfed (image sharing), and Loops (short form video), and Ghost (long form blog/newsletters), and PeerTube (long form videos) and ….

        If a publication system had ActivityPub commenting, you could subscribe to certain authors and see every paper they publish and the comments on them in the same place as your daily convos with online friends or where you watch your favorite science communicators do science videos (like says Steve Mould)…

        The interoperability is what’s missing most in BioRXive I think.

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        • Raghu, thousands of scientists are already using bluesky on a daily basis, posting papers, writing threads about them, and commenting on the papers that come up in their feeds. My proposal is (basically) that these posts of papers *become* the definitive publication.

          As Daniel said, because atproto and ActivityPub are open, independent developers can add features on top of the usual bluesky/mastodon experience. Here is a video that describes one independently developed app that adds many of the science features I mention (skip to about 2:30 for the description):

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC1lPAv-EMU

          I propose that bluesky add some of these features to their own app.

        • Quote from above: “Here is a video that describes one independently developed app that adds many of the science features I mention (skip to about 2:30 for the description):”

          From the presentation powerpoint:

          “We’ve both been frustrated by our colleagues’ reluctance to move from X” (minute 04.02)

          “So we have some safety alerts. So Ted who has over 20000 followers. So someone with a ton of followers just quoted your post. Little alert.” (minute 10.45)

          “So there’s a purple colour around Eugene’s profile picture. We also have yellow and blue, depending on whether you are mutuals, they’re following you or you’re following them.” (minute 13.27)

          Holy short-term attention grabbing, power-dynamics, groupthink, in-crowd, and cult-like processes Batman! Lea: Let’s Exemplify Academia.

        • @Daniel, Ed:

          Thanks. It is an interesting idea that the lack of commenting on existing preprint sites is due to not being connected to a larger social network. I don’t think this is true; whatever network you like, I suspect that the fraction of papers that are actually commented on will be vanishingly small. But it’s an interesting hypothesis. (I would also agree that it’s not worse than the current system.)

      • I agree. I’ve commented on preprints biorxiv, ecoevorxiv and RG (which has since deactivated comments), sometimes on the same paper, and never had a substantive response or amendment. One paper I then posted the same critique post-publication on PubPeer and I then got a response from authors agreeing! Maybe it works in some disciplines, but it many it seems to me that preprinting it merely about claiming territory as quickly as possible, not about getting feedback.

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  6. I wrote something one time as a result of participating on this blog here where certain projects concerning publishing and peer review were discussed. I commented the gist of this idea a few times on here already, but thought it might be useful to do again here given the remarks about journals and peer review and costs of publishing.

    This is a proposal which may also fit well with the possible role of post-publication review which I think Gelman and King have written about and has been mentioned on this blog as well (see post dated February 26, 2025), as “published” papers can be updated to a new version as a result of feedback by others in this idea of publihsing and peer review. Perhaps this might be something to consider (again?) in light of that post publication peer review idea. Here’s the gist of the idea:

    You could have a website or (section of an) online journal or server or whatever term is appropriate here where the primary goal of scientific publication is to advance communication and discourse among both scholars and the public. Therefore, there is little gatekeeping. A paper will be peer reviewed, and the reviews, however positive or negative, will be published alongside the work. The purpose of this format is to encourage open and thoughtful evaluation of works of empirical behavioral science during and beyond the initial review process.

    The reviews are published separately and non-anonymously. Perhaps it can be argued that the reasons for publishing reviews with the reviewers’ names are similar to the reasons for publishing scientific papers with the authors’ names. Publishing reviews non-anonymously and separately also opens up several options, and could lead to several positive consequences. For instance:

    A reviewer could list a published review on their Curriculum Vitae. A text like “reviewed for Theory and Society” or a list of “Publications” are common things to depict on a scientist’s Curriculum Vitae. Publishing non-anonymous reviews provides the option to depict a separate list of “Published Reviews” on a Curriculum Vitae.

    Employers, members of PhD committees, members of hiring committees, etc. can use published reviews as an additional way to assess and evaluate a candidate which has listed their published reviews on their Curriculum Vitae.

    Several (arguably) scientifically problematic processes and issues regarding peer-review seem less likely to occur using this format of publishing and reviewing papers. The decision to publish a paper is not heavily dependent on the reviewers’ judgement and decision as is commonly often the case. This, for instance, makes it less likely that a certain reviewer can block an author’s paper because it might be critical of the reviewer’s own work. Other forms of peer-review abuse such as a reviewer attempting to increase the citation count of their own work by recommending their own work as references to be added seem also less likely for the same reason.

    The publishing of the review means that a review can be cited by the reviewer, the authors of the reviewed paper, or others reading the review (for instance, in addition to the reviewed paper). Interesting ideas for follow up studies provided by a reviewer in a published review can, for example, be added to or discussed in the discussion section of the reviewed paper by the original authors in a revision which includes a citation of the review.

    A review can perhaps even lead to co-authorship concerning the paper under review or a future paper. If a review catches big mistakes, or provides tremendous improvements of the reviewed paper, the reviewer might have contributed substantially to the final or updated version of the paper. In that case, the authors of the reviewed paper might decide to ask whether the reviewer wants to become a co-author on the reviewed paper. Or, the reviewer might be asked to contribute as a co-author on a next project. In this way, a review in this format might lead to earning co-authorship.

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  7. But if each citation is worth $100,000… that’s a great return on investment!

    I’ll leave it to others to rescale benefits into other common metrics (number of Jamaican beef patties, etc.)

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