Two years after President Joe Biden’s administration shook up scientific publishing by calling for immediate free access to scientific journal articles produced from federally funded research by the end of 2025, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Department of Energy (DOE) have released their final plans for complying. All other U.S. research funding agencies are expected to follow suit by the end of this month.
The NIH and DOE policies require grantees to post accepted, peer-reviewed manuscripts in each agency’s public repository as soon as they are published, among other stipulations. Research funding agencies are also expected to require immediate sharing of project data. (NIH already began to require this in a 2023 policy.) First requested by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in 2022, the requirements mark a major step forward for the global open science movement: Nine percent of the world’s research papers have U.S.-funded authors.
Advocates of open science have offered qualified praise. But universities are worried about logistics and costs, and many publishers are dismayed.
One way to satisfy the new requirement while preserving publishers’ revenue is so-called gold open access (OA), in which authors or their institutions pay an article processing charge (APC) for making a paper immediately free to read. The fees average about $2000, and critics have called the model unsustainable, especially for unfunded researchers. (The Science family of journals includes one that charges APCs; Science’s News department is editorially independent of the journals.)
Another no-APC option is immediate, zero-embargo public access—also referred to as green OA—in which authors or their institutions upload an accepted manuscript, lacking copyediting, formatting, and other polishing, into a repository. Since 2013, NIH and other U.S. agencies have required a form of green OA but allowed publishers to embargo the public release of these articles for up to 12 months. (The Science family of subscription journals is among the few that permit immediate green access.) This year, 30 universities and academic organizations and more than 170 faculty members and librarians signed a petition calling on the research agencies to adopt the zero-embargo green approach. But among the 144 written comments submitted to NIH this year about its draft policy, several highly profitable publishers argued that immediate green OA would remove the incentive for readers and institutions to pay subscription fees, which support journals’ editorial processes.
The OSTP, NIH, and DOE policies do not endorse any one business model for zero-embargo public access and do not bar authors from paying an APC, which is a permitted way of meeting the zero-embargo requirement.
Under the new policies, small, nonprofit scientific societies could be particularly vulnerable. The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), for example, could take a hit because up to 40% of the papers in its four subscription journals are authored by NIH grantees, says Angela Cochran, the society’s vice president for publishing. “Librarians have said to me that they don’t have any plans to drop subscriptions to journals just because a large portion of the content is available as green open access. But … there are financial realities that may change that answer over time.”
NIH will need to mount a substantial educational campaign pointing authors to the non-APC alternative and explaining it, some university officials told the agency this year in their written comments. “Our researchers and librarians are already hearing incorrect information from some publishers who claim public access policies require federally funded researchers to publish open access and pay an APC,” wrote Karen Caputo of Case Western Reserve University.
Other university officials cited practical obstacles. Depositing content in NIH’s repository, PubMed Central—including formatting the article and providing required metadata—is a time-consuming task. “This isn’t like a person uploads a Word file or a PDF and they’re done,” Cochran adds. Currently, publishers often do this work. Universities also objected that if a grantee publishes a paper through paid OA after their NIH grant has expired, the agency will not foot the bill for the APC.
Some research universities are prepared for the new policy because they already require or encourage faculty members to deposit the accepted manuscript in a public, institutional repository, says Peter Suber of Harvard University, where he is a senior adviser on its public access policies. About one-half of the 30 U.S. universities receiving the most federal research funding have such policies, according to an analysis by Science. “But a lot of people need hand holding” to comply, Suber says, and at some universities, “there aren’t enough hands to do all the holding.”
Other questions about the new policies surround copyright and who controls when a paper is published publicly. NIH and DOE both assert that work funded by those agencies is covered by a “government use license,” authorized by an existing U.S. regulation, that supports zero-embargo depositing of grantees’ papers—overriding standard contracts authors sign with publishers requiring embargoes. The agencies also assert that the government license allows other uses of the texts, a stance that may limit publishers’ ability to require permission and charge a fee for working with their articles.
Already this year, some large publishers have sold access to their paywalled content to AI developers for “text mining” to improve algorithms; Taylor and Francis, for example, signed a $10 million deal with Microsoft. Such deals have also been cut by small nonprofit scientific societies. ASCO’s revenue from this licensing matches the amount of money it earns from journal subscriptions, Cochran says.
But open-science advocates have long argued that such access should be free. The 2022 OSTP policy recommended that deposited manuscripts be “machine readable,” and NIH’s draft wording required that. Publishers objected, and the final NIH version omits “machine readable” but promises “usability” that is “consistent with copyright law.”
Whether the new policies will survive scrutiny by Congress remains a wild card. An appropriations bill for the 2025 fiscal year in the House of Representatives bars any funding for implementing the 2022 policy. The corresponding bill in the Senate directs OSTP “to instruct [agencies] not to limit grant recipients’ ability to copyright, freely license, or control their works.” Final resolution on the bills—which govern OSTP and the National Science Foundation but not NIH, DOE, or several other grantmaking agencies funded through separate bills—is unlikely to come until 2025, after all the agencies have announced their final public access policies.
President-elect Donald Trump could also kill the policies, which might dovetail with his pledge to slash government regulations. But in 2020 his first administration was close to issuing an executive order requiring agencies to implement a public access policy similar to the new ones. Some publishers objected to it, and he left office without issuing the order.
Despite the political uncertainty, some are confident the die is cast. As Suber puts it, “Zero-embargo green is coming on a large scale.” But grantees will still need time to adapt, says Brian Hitson, a DOE official who helped lead the development of that agency’s new policy. DOE plans to give grantees up to 2 years to fully comply, to give them time to adjust their processes for tracking and depositing the publications. “This is not something that’s going to happen overnight.”
