Industry specialists testified at a US congressional hearing on the state of scientific publishing.Credit: House Science, Space, and Technology Committee
From ‘paper mills’ that sell authorships on fake or low-quality research papers to the costs associated with open-access publishing, US lawmakers are paying increasing attention to widely-debated issues in scientific publishing. In a rare show of unity, members of the US House of Representatives from both sides of the political aisle agreed at a hearing that these issues deserve more attention from government — but there was less unity on what the solutions should be.
The hearing, on 15 April, was run by the the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. It addressed a provision in the US government’s proposed 2027 budget that would prohibit researchers and universities from spending federal funds on “expensive subscriptions” to academic journals and “prohibitively high” publishing fees.
These fees became common as funders, such as the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), stepped up the pressure on grant recipients to make peer-reviewed papers either free to read, or fully open access, as soon as they are published. This prompted some publishers that rely on journal subscriptions for revenue to offer open-access publishing options — and to charge fees to publish articles through this route.
Journals say that these article processing charges (APCs) are necessary to cover the costs of evaluating and publishing papers. But critics, including the NIH, say that APCs can be a problem because they reduce the amount of funding available for research. APCs typically cost between US$1,000 and $5,000, or nearly $13,000 to publish in Nature and some of its affiliated journals. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its journals team and its publisher, Springer Nature.)
Publishing challenges
California representative Zoe Lofgren, the leading Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, said that high publishing fees, especially those at for-profit publishers, exploit scientists and taxpayers, who often fund the research. But representative Emilia Sykes, a Democrat from Ohio, said that the restrictions on paying such fees as set out in the 2027 budget proposed by the administration of US President Donald Trump would leave some journals unable to perform their quality-control reviews. “This is an issue in need of a scalpel, and [the budget provision] is a sledgehammer,” said Sykes, who is the ranking member on the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee.
Republican representatives argued that the current APC model distorts the research enterprise. Representative Rich McCormick, a Republican from Georgia who chairs the subcommittee, said that the practice of charging APCs “incentivizes publishers to prioritize quantity over quality” and feeds predatory journal practices, in which publishers collect fees while providing “no meaningful peer review”.
Problematic practices such as paper mills are largely enabled by a ‘publish or perish’ culture in academia, said Kate Travis, managing editor of Retraction Watch — a website that maintains a public database of retractions — who is based in Washington DC. Because researchers are often rewarded with jobs, tenure and grants on the basis of the quantity of their publications, a lucrative market has emerged for bad actors to exploit that desperation.
Republicans on the committee were also concerned by the impact of large language models that make it easier and quicker for these fraudulent businesses to mass-produce fake scientific content, flooding the literature with ‘AI slop’. “When bad science gets published, it wastes taxpayer dollars, misleads policymakers, and can even put public health at risk,” said representative Brian Babin, a Republican from Texas who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
No easy solutions
The congressional committee seemed aligned on the need to craft policies to change practices in the scientific-publishing industry. But specialists in scientific publishing who were called to testify at the hearing noted that finding good solutions would not be easy.