The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) looks set to bar paying the highest fees for its researchers to publish in high-profile journals. These include around 30 journals such as Nature Communications, Cell Reports and Science Advances, according to a report in Science. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US is also considering setting limits on journal charges for open access.
The report said that a draft policy was sent out to researchers in China that would stop them using academy money to pay article processing charges (APCs), a fee paid to publishers to make articles open access. The same policy will also prevent other central government agencies from carrying the cost of APCs. The new policy also blocks payment for over 100 journals viewed as being mired in ‘research-integrity problems’, Science reports.
Given the list of journals, information scientist Stefanie Haustein at the University of Ottawa estimates that CAS has introduced an APC cap of around $5000 (£3700). Researchers at CAS can still publish in hybrid open access journals such as Nature, where you have the option of remaining behind a paywall or paying the $12,690 APC.
Haustein’s own research has found that yearly spending on APCs tripled from $910 million in 2019 to $2.5 billion in 2023, with companies such as MDPI ($682 million), Elsevier ($583 million) and Springer Nature ($547 million) generating the most from these charges.
The NIH said last summer that it was also considering a cap on researchers it funds using grants to pay APCs. It calculated that the average global APC is $1236. The NIH said it would consider barring paying for APCs or setting limits of $2000 to $3000. Another alternative approach would limit publication costs to 0.8% of a grant or $20,000 over the lifetime of a grant, as well as an APC cap of $6000.
Claudia Pagliari, a medical informatics specialist at the University of Edinburgh, says she’s not surprised by China’s decision. ‘It is not clear, as costs have remained static or gone down, why article processing charges have gone up.’ Pagliari and colleagues described open access publishing as starting with noble intentions, but says that it incentivised journal proliferation, foisting costs onto researchers and is unfair to researchers in poorer regions or disciplines.
Companies stand accused of profiteering from research papers that they don’t fund or write, relying on the research community to peer review at no cost. Haustein and her colleagues report that profit margins exceed 30% for big publishers, with Elsevier above 37% for the last 10 years. ‘Wiley, Taylor & Francis and Springer Nature, they’re all up there with these extreme profit margins,’ says Haustein. ‘Money leaves the academic community and goes to shareholders in these companies.’
Haustein worries that caps might not have the impact people hope for. ‘I doubt the big five for-profit publishers will say fair enough, you caught us, we are lowering our APCs,’ she says. Instead, they will return to a system where users pay for access.
The Science report noted that the Chinese government has been trying to develop 400 top scientific journals as affordable alternatives to western ones. ‘They are proposing to withdraw funding in a way that would cause harm to these publishing institutions, but we don’t know if they are planning to open negotiations with western partners or publishers themselves, or are they going to create identical versions with their own rules?’ Pagliari says.
She is somewhat puzzled that CAS, the largest research funder in the world with more than 50,000 researchers, did not use its leverage to extract more favourable terms. ‘China’s researchers were among the first beneficiaries of this online open access publishing,’ says Pagliari. ‘[China] paid for researchers to publish their groundbreaking research in high-hitting research journals, a sort of investment in global reputation.’
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