ARL Comments on NIH “Maximizing Research Funds by Limiting Allowable Publishing Costs” — Association of Research Libraries

"A growing number of funders, publishers, and libraries have concluded that the article processing charge (APC) is a suboptimal business model for scientific publishing, because it creates barriers to participation, incentivizes unsustainable growth in publication volume, and entrenches the journal article as the sole research output of value. Yet our concern is that imposing caps on APCs will simply shift high costs elsewhere rather than addressing their root causes. Institutions can expect renewed pressure to sign open-access publishing agreements so that their researchers can still publish in prestige journals with APCs that exceed the cap, straining library budgets at a moment when federal investments in institutional research support are being pared back. Efforts to move research assessment away from an emphasis on journal brand are underway, and we recommend that NIH support these efforts by ensuring consideration of the value of nonarticle outputs in the review of funding proposals. We also encourage NIH to expand its definition of allowable publication costs to include preprint review services that offer rigorous expert assessments of research results but may not issue binary accept/reject decisions. In our view, actions like these are more likely to align with existing reform efforts and to avoid damaging second-order effects than imposing isolated caps on publication costs."