US lawmakers are tightening controls on scientific publishing practices

From “paper mills” that sell copyrights of falsified or low-quality scientific articles to the costs associated with open access publishing, US lawmakers are increasingly paying attention to widely debated issues in scholarly publishing. In a rare show of unity, members of the U.S. House of Representatives from both sides of the political aisle agreed at a hearing that these issues deserve more government attention — but there was less unity about what the solutions should be.

The April 15 hearing was organized by the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology of the US House of Representatives. He considered a provision in The US government’s proposed 2027 budget which would prohibit researchers and universities from spending federal funds on “expensive subscriptions” to academic journals and “exorbitantly high” publication fees.

These fees have become common as funders such as The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), have increased the pressure on grantees to make peer-reviewed articles either free to read or fully open as soon as they are published. This has prompted some publishers who rely on journal subscriptions for revenue to offer open access publishing options and charge fees for publishing articles that way.

Magazines say that these Item Processing Charges (APC) are needed to cover the costs of evaluation and publication of reports. But the critics including the NIHsay APCs can be a problem because they reduce the amount of funding available for research. APCs typically cost between $1,000 and $5,000, or nearly $13,000 to post in Nature and some of its associated journals. (NatureThe news team of is editorially independent from the journal team and its publisher, Springer Nature.)

Publishing challenges

Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, said high publication fees, especially those of for-profit publishers, exploit scientists and taxpayers who often fund research. But Representative Emilia Sykes, D-Ohio, said limits on paying such fees, as outlined in the 2027 budget proposed by US President Donald Trump’s administration, would leave some journals unable to carry out their quality-control reviews. “This is an issue that needs a scalpel, and (budget provision) is a sledgehammer,” said Sykes, who is the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight.

Republican representatives have argued that the current APC model distorts the research enterprise. Rep. Rich McCormick, a Georgia Republican who chairs the subcommittee, said APC’s billing practice “incentivizes publishers to prioritize quantity over quality” and fuels predatory journal practices in which publishers collect fees while providing “no meaningful peer review.”

Problematic practices such as paper mills are largely enabled by a publish or perish culture in academia, said Kate Travis, managing editor of Retraction Watch — a website that maintains a public database of retractions — which is based in Washington. Because researchers are often rewarded with jobs, tenure, and grants based on the volume of their publications, a lucrative market has emerged for bad actors to exploit this desperation.

Republicans on the committee were also concerned about the impact of large language patterns that make it easier and faster for these fraudulent firms to mass-produce false scientific content, flooding the literature with AI sloppy. “When bad science is published, it wastes taxpayer money, misleads policymakers and can even put public health at risk,” said Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, who chairs the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.

There are no easy solutions

The congressional committee seemed to agree on the need to develop policies to change practices in the scholarly publishing industry. But experts in scientific publishing who were called to testify at the hearing noted that finding good solutions will not be easy.