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In July, the National Institutes of Health announced that it would cap excessive article-processing charges (APCs) for publishing taxpayer-funded research. The NIH is exploring a handful of different ways of accomplishing this, such as placing an all-out ban on using NIH funds for APCs or allowing APCs of differing amounts depending on whether the journal compensates peer reviewers. Their goal is to have a new policy by the start of 2026.
While this might seem like a technical change, it reflects a deeper principle: Publicly funded science should be treated as a nonexcludable, nonrivalrous public good -- meaning no one should be excluded from access, and one person's use should not diminish its value to others. Steep paywalls and inflated APCs violate both principles, transforming public knowledge into private profit.
To outsiders, academic publishing may seem like a small concern. In reality, it's an enormous global industry, comparable to the music-recording and film industries but much more profitable. Elsevier, one of the sector's dominant players, is part of a business unit that posted a 38-percent profit margin for its parent company in 2023.
Commercial "read and publish" agreements, now common in academic publishing, often function as artificially scarce "club goods" -- resources that are nonrivalrous but excludable. Unlike public goods, club goods restrict access to paying members (think Costco). These deals give institutions access to subscription journals ("read") and allow affiliated authors to publish open-access articles ("publish") -- but only at a cost. They block universal access and require authors or their institutions to pay to make research publicly available.
These agreements harm both authors and science. They consolidate power in the hands of large commercial publishers while marginalizing nonprofit and scholarly society journals that resist absorption into commercial portfolios. Worse, they entrench inequity by excluding authors without deep-pocketed institutions -- especially independent researchers and scholars in low- and middle-income countries. Perhaps most damaging, they lock institutions into multiyear contracts that siphon resources from alternative publishing models and thus stall reform. Read-and-publish deals drain library budgets, disadvantage underresourced scholars, and impede innovation, all while enriching some of the most profitable corporations on the planet.
Ironically, academe itself helped create this system. For centuries, scholars shared ideas through letters or at professional gatherings. Journals were few, and most were managed by universities or learned societies. But after World War II, the U.S. government dramatically increased its investment in academic research. To help universities manage the influx, federal grants covered not just research but overhead, including library subscriptions. Accreditation agencies rewarded universities for increasing their journal holdings, creating a lucrative environment for commercial publishers.
Sensing an opportunity, private companies created thousands of journals. Authors had to transfer copyright, giving publishers total control over access and distribution. University libraries, flush with federal support, subscribed liberally. But as subscription prices rose and library budgets tightened, many institutions couldn't keep up. The public -- whose taxes funded the research -- was asked to pay again to read the results.
This contradiction spurred a push for reform. In the 1990s, Harold E. Varmus, a Nobel laureate who led the NIH then, proposed E-biomed, a free digital repository for biomedical research. Although publishers initially resisted, it ultimately led to the creation of PubMed Central, a free public archive of life-sciences research. Varmus is also a co-founder of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), which offers credible open-access alternatives. Yet even nonprofit ventures like PLOS often charge authors to cover costs, and commercial publishers quickly found ways to adapt and protect their margins.
In this new environment, publishers pivoted. Instead of charging readers, they charged authors -- and the costs are staggering. Globally, authors spent over $8 billion on APCs between 2019 and 2023. Nature charges up to $12,690 to make an article openly available. Other Springer Nature journals charge between $1,500 and $5,000. Elsevier, Sage, and Taylor & Francis impose similar fees.
Why do authors pay? Because their careers depend on it. Tenure, funding, and prestige often hinge on publication in high-impact journals. For early-career researchers, APCs are unavoidable. Some forgo travel or even basic needs to afford publication fees. We've merely shifted the burden from readers to authors while keeping the underlying problem: publicly funded knowledge remains privatized.
Consolidation has only worsened the situation. Nature now oversees dozens of branded journals. The British Medical Journal publishes over 60. Frontiers offers 228 titles. Even JAMA now has a dozen specialty spinoffs. The nonprofit American Psychological Association (APA) publishes nearly 90 journals. In 2023, APA reported $137 million in revenue -- $113 million from licensing, royalties, and publishing, compared to just $8.5 million from member dues.
Some argue that high APCs reflect real costs. But that's difficult to justify. Producing a 3,500-word article with a few tables should cost about the same regardless of field. Yet Nature charges $12,690 for its flagship titles, compared to $6,990 for Nature Communications and $2,090 for Nature Communications Psychology. These differences seem more about market tolerance than production expense.
Meanwhile, the business model is beginning to fray. Peer reviewers and editors -- whose unpaid labor props up the entire system -- are growing weary. Authors and librarians are frustrated by relentless price hikes that have little connection to actual costs. In the print era, publishers paid for typesetting, printing, and shipping. Today, most of those costs are gone.
So what's the alternative?
We don't need to blow up the system, but we do need to reclaim it. Instead of outsourcing dissemination to multinational publishers, universities and scholarly societies could run their own journals. Peer review remains vital, but reviewers should be credited. Reviews could even be rated for quality, and the data could be used as justification for promotion and tenure. One of the three options NIH is exploring would pay peer reviewers $50 per hour.
Institutions and funders could invest in the infrastructure needed to support nonprofit, open-access publishing: platforms, editorial services, and long-term archiving. The NIH's cap on APCs is a welcome first step, but more collective action is needed. For example, universities currently pay wildly different rates for the same journal bundles. A consortium of institutions could leverage its monopsony power to standardize pricing based on the emerging NIH model. The millions now spent on APCs and subscriptions could instead fund open-access platforms where articles are free to read, authors retain copyright, and metadata and persistent identifiers ensure discoverability.
To be clear, policies to address article-processing charges (APCs) require careful evaluation. A recent essay by Christopher Steven Marcum, former assistant director of open science and data policy at the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, cautions that an NIH cap on APCs could have unintended consequences. Journals might cut corners and compromise quality if forced to operate under lower caps, while others that charge reasonable APCs might instead raise their fees to the maximum allowable level. Moreover, if carried out without coordination across public and private funding agencies, such a policy could create significant disruption in the publishing ecosystem.
The triumphs and challenges of some established alternative-publishing models deserve study. The University of California system now offers a subsidized publishing program called eScholarship, complete with editorial and peer-review services and tools to facilitate publishing and production. Diamond Open Access publishing offers the major advantage of eliminating costs for both authors and readers, thereby promoting equity, inclusivity, and the wider dissemination of scholarship, especially in regions like Latin America, where community-supported platforms include SciELO and Redalyc.
The model aligns with historical traditions of scholarly societies and universities managing journals as public goods, and its operating costs are typically much lower than commercial publishing, often relying on institutional support and volunteer labor. However, Diamond OA faces significant challenges: Many journals are underfunded, depend heavily on unpaid work, and struggle with long-term sustainability, preservation, and visibility in major indexing databases such as Web of Science and Scopus. As a result, authors in medicine and the life sciences must still gain recognition by the traditional "prestige" outlets to achieve tenure and promotion. While Diamond OA advances social justice and bibliodiversity, it requires stronger coordination, recognition, and financial support from funders and institutions to be a robust alternative to commercial open-access models.
As an academic community, we need to seriously explore the risks and benefits of alternative models of scholarly communication. The commercial publishing model no longer serves its purpose. It exploits public science, depends on unpaid labor, and restricts access to knowledge that should be shared freely. The NIH's recent move is a promising beginning -- but real change will require more than adjusting payment policies. It will demand that we reclaim science as the public good it was always meant to be.