DOGE order leads to journal cancellations by U.S. agricultural library | Science | AAAS

"The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on Friday told staff members it has canceled subscriptions carried by its National Agricultural Library as part of a drive by President Donald Trump’s administration to cut federal spending. The move appears to drop nearly 400 of the library’s roughly 2000 journals, including many prominent in various agricultural subfields—but curiously none from the world’s three largest scientific publishers, all of which are for-profit. USDA staff members depicted the move as hasty, indiscriminate slashing....

USDA’s subscription cancellations, which an internal email says were carried out under the supervision of the Elon Musk–led Department of Government Efficiency, eliminated all journals produced by any of 17 publishers, according to a list circulated internally at USDA on Friday and obtained by Science. (The library will still be able to provide users access to back issues published in 2023 or earlier—a standard provision of contracts in the event of cancellations.)

Most of the affected publishers are university or nonprofit scientific society presses, including Cambridge University Press; Oxford University Press; the American Phytopathological Society; the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which publishes the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; and AAAS, which publishes Science. (Science’s News section is editorially independent.) Several of the journals whose subscriptions were canceled rank in the top quartile for impact factor in their subfield—for example, the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Food & Function and Oxford’s Journal of Integrated Pest Management.

The National Agricultural Library cuts didn’t include journals at Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley. Together those publishers accounted for more than half of the library’s journal subscriptions before the cuts, according to an analysis by Science. Studies of journal subscription fees indicate that on average, scientific society publishers charge less than such for-profit companies...."