In an exclusive interview with The DisInformation Chronicle, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya explains his latest policy to control monopoly science publishers now raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers, while sometimes playing partisan politics and pushing fake narratives. The NIH announced yesterday that they will soon cap the “article processing fees” that publishers can charge NIH-funded researchers to make their studies public and available to American taxpayers.
NIH funds much of the planet’s biomedical science, but this research has remained locked up by pricey science journals that charge Americans expensive fees to read the results of the very studies they funded. The publishers of Science Magazine, for example, demand $30 to read a single study.
However, this changed recently when Dr. Bhattacharya demanded that journals make NIH-funded studies public as soon as they publish them. However, taxpayers are still on the hook, paying the “open access fee” that journals charge scientists.
In the case of the esteemed Nature Magazine, this means a $12,600 fee. Of course, scientists don’t have thousands of dollars lying around for publishing fees, so NIH-funded researchers simply charge that cost back to the American taxpayer as part of their NIH grants. In effect, taxpayers get charged twice: first when they fund an NIH grant for a university professor, and second when they pay that professor’s publishing fee to a science journal.
And this money quickly adds up.
The six largest science publishers charge researchers $1.8 billion in publishing fees every year, with American taxpayers soaking up a large portion of that money. NIH’s latest policy will control these costs in the future, ensuring more NIH money goes to scientists and their research.
Dr. Bhattacharya spoke with me about the exorbitant costs researchers pay these monopoly publishers to get their studies out in the public, as well as the blatant games publishers play to promote partisan agendas that corrupt public discourse. …
Longish interview folllows.
Wow, talk about cronyism in business, especially the business of publishing scientific results! Lots of money is being paid to magazines to publish the results of experiments paid for by the Murkan taxpayer and then make the public. This is a mystery to me how they can permit this kind of in-your-face ripoff of fees for what is ours in the first place. Not mentioned here, but the same situation goes on with royalties for patents on devices and processes created by government supported scientists and inventors. We support them, we pay for their experiments and discoveries, so we should get the royalties or not allow them to patent anything at all and have everything for any taxpayer to use. We paid for it, so it is ours. Isn’t that the way it works?