APC Caps and Bans - Why Funder Policies Aimed at Curbing the Publishing Industry Don’t Work - The Scholarly Kitchen

"This week DeltaThink released a report looking at the potential impacts of the long-awaited NIH plan to cap grant recipient spending on publication fees, particularly article processing charges (APCs) for open access (OA) publication. The report suggests the NIH’s policy (depending on how it is implemented) will result in a decline of somewhere between 0.9% and around 3.5% in the global amount paid for OA publishing. But the raw numbers don’t really tell the story of what will happen with such a policy, and it’s worth thinking about the reasons why it will be much less impactful than it seems.

The NIH is not alone in looking to change the way researchers publish their results, nor in looking to regulate publisher business practices. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has announced a policy specifically aimed at around 30 “high-profile, high-fee” OA journals including Nature Communications, Cell Reports, and Science Advances. Other funders have gone further. Cancer Research UK last month announced that they were generally fine with a 6-month embargo on papers becoming available via Green OA and that they would cease all payment for OA APCs. Since January 2025, Wellcome only pays for APCs in fully-OA journals, and at the same time, the Gates Foundation ceased APC payments across the board. Within each of these policies is an implicit (and sometimes explicit) goal of using the power of the purse to change researcher publication behavior and to restructure research communications, whether pushing authors away from journals deemed excessively expensive to eliminating subscription journals altogether."