In the spring of 2024, Ali Kharrazi, then an editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Current Research in Environmental Sustainability, or CRSUST, received a routine request to review several papers. Although guest editors had already recommended accepting the work, something unusual stood out. One of the papers included the phrase: “The way to foster love is by cultivating disruption.” Kharrazi did not think the article had any place in a scientific journal, much less one where he was named as an editor. Plus, by his account, the paper lacked a well-developed methods section, a key part of any scientific article where the authors detail the exact procedure of their study. Despite what Kharrazi saw as shortcomings, he said another editor-in-chief at the journal, Brenda Lin, wanted to accept the paper — in part because the article had been co-authored by one of three guest editors. As Kharrazi, who studies environmental sustainability at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, described it in an email to Undark, it all seemed “less like editorial oversight and more like carrying water for a network trying to sneak in subpar papers.” (Lin did not respond to requests for comment.) #### Related Paper Mills: Science Publishing’s Achilles Heel “It was talking about love,” Kharrazi said. “It had nothing to do with serious science. They went to a workshop, talked about some random thing, and they were trying to turn that into a paper. It was just bonkers.” (The paper’s co-author, Bruce Goldstein, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, wrote in an email that his submitted manuscript had a methods section, which he and his co-author strengthened prior to publishing elsewhere. Goldstein noted that he could not comment on confidential editorial decisions at CRSUST.) Kharrazi resigned from his position at the journal in May 2025. The current co-editor-in-chief, Magnus Moglia, disputed Kharrazi’s characterization of the journal, noting via email: “[W]hat he describes does largely not align with my experience. I have not been encouraged at any point to accept low quality papers.” Rebecca Clear, a spokesperson at the scientific publishing house Elsevier, which publishes the journal, did not answer specific questions about the publishing process, but provided a statement that said in part: “At Elsevier, high quality is of the utmost importance” and that the publisher routinely rejects submissions “that do not reach the high standards required.” But as Kharrazi and others see it, examples like this one reflect longstanding issues in scientific publishing, a multibillion-dollar industry dominated by for-profit publishers: Reed Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and Sage. The publication of science is a hallmark of its reliability, and the process goes something like this: Scientists conduct research, write up their findings, and submit these manuscripts to a journal. The work typically undergoes peer review, where other experts evaluate the paper and offer comments, usually for no pay. Based on their feedback, the journal’s editors either reject or accept the paper. > “It had nothing to do with serious science. They went to a workshop, talked about some random thing, and they were trying to turn that into a paper. It was just bonkers.” The traditional business model relied on a paywall after publication — readers footed the bill, often through institutional subscriptions and libraries. In the 2000s, a radical alternative emerged: open access journals. In open access, instead of readers having to pay, the paper’s authors cover the expenses of publication. This comes in the form of an article processing charge, or an APC. On average, the fees are an estimated $2,000 to $3,000 per article in the U.S., a price that many in publishing defend. Meagan Phelan, communications director for the Science family of journals at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, a nonprofit publisher of six journals, argues that coordinating the peer review process, doing validation and image integrity checks, and data sharing all add up. “You would think publishing online could be less expensive, but there’s a lot that goes into it,” she said. From 2019 to 2023, authors paid an estimated $8.3 billion for open access to six publishers. And critics, including Kharrazi, contend the APC model creates incentives that are at odds with high-quality science: Since volume equals profit, the model favors quantity over quality. A recent Cambridge University Press report on the issue quoted one librarian: “[T]he journal’s interest in rejecting bad science is in direct conflict with its interest in maintaining revenue.” The APC at Current Research in Environmental Sustainability, one of some 2,900 titles published by Elsevier, is $2,620. At the journal, Kharrazi had a front row view of the APC model’s effects, and he did not like what he saw. So long as a reviewer signed off, he told Undark, whatever it was — credible research, junk science, AI-generated text — the financial incentives were to publish. APCs have drawn the ire of major scientific funders, in part because grant funding often covers the fees. In 2025, the National Institutes of Health director, Jay Bhattacharya, announced that a federal public access policy would go into effect six months earlier than planned; publishers cannot paywall NIH-funded research, even temporarily. Bhattacharya also called for a “crackdown” on APCs. The agency proposed several changes, with a scheduled effective date of Jan. 1, 2026, to either cap the amount of federal grant money recipients could spend on APCs or disallow such spending altogether. “These costs ultimately burden taxpayers,” a post on the agency website said, “who have already funded the underlying research.” (Craig Fritz, a media officer at the NIH, said the agency does not have the exact figures on funds spent on APCs.) Covers from several open access journals. In the 2000s, open access emerged as a radical alternative to traditional scientific publishing. Major for-profit publishers have embraced the model. _Visual: Undark_ Some scholars think that the NIH is on the right track, at least in part. “What I think that the policy gets right is that it identifies that there’s a problem — and that’s the biggest funder in the world making that recognition of ‘this has gotten out of control,’” said Juan Pablo Alperin, co-director of the Scholarly Communication Lab, or ScholCommLab, and an associate professor of publishing at Simon Fraser University. “These prices are too high and we need to do something.” But Alperin and others questioned whether APC caps would yield the intended results. While the NIH approach tries to limit how much federal funds authors can use, it appears to do little to address the root cause: the for-profit model. Alperin advocated for a more dramatic overhaul — one that would remove profit-seekers from academic publishing altogether, and build new models to cover the expenses. Eric Schares, a librarian at Iowa State University and a ScholCommLab collaborator, said the proposed caps do not place a limit on what publishers can charge; it’s a cap on what portion of NIH grant funding authors can use to cover publishing costs. “It’s putting a Band-Aid over the deeper problem,” he said, which is the academic publishing system — “how academia is set up — rather than curing the underlying disease of profit-making that is plaguing scholarly publishing.” * * * It wasn’t always like this. When the first scientific journal emerged 360 years ago, the scientific revolution was powered by the _Respublica literaria,_ a distributed network of correspondents who developed a system of exchanging scientific knowledge for free, primarily by letters. Around the mid-1600s, as scientific societies formed, they began publishing journals. Institutions followed suit. In the mid-20th century, following exponential growth, commercial firms, notably Elsevier and Springer, entered the picture. From there, for-profit publishers overtook academic societies as primary players in the dissemination of scientific literature. The for-profit model traditionally involved authors submitting their manuscript for free. “But should the journal decide to publish it, the author would give away, sign away, 100 percent of their rights to the manuscript,” said Christopher Steven Marcum, a consultant and the former assistant director for open science and data policy at the Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden administration. These rights essentially amount to property: The holder of such rights makes money reproducing the work. “So the journals are sort of double dipping on that front,” Marcum said. The publications don’t have to pay for the information they plan to publish, he noted, and then they “own the rights to that information, and then could license and package the articles to sell.” > “It’s putting a Band-Aid over the deeper problem.” The advent of the internet proved disruptive, and had been expected to drive down the costs of scientific publishing. In the early 2000s, reformers called for open access publishing, which made resources widely available on the internet with more flexible licensing and copyright restrictions. Publishers initially resisted open access, which would cut into their profit margins. But then they began expanding the use of a different step in the process: the APC. In the early 2000s, BioMed Central, a new for-profit publisher in the United Kingdom, introduced a slate of BMC-branded online journals with APC fees. By today’s standards, they were low, costing $500 to publish. According to a 2020 paper on the company, it “was one of the first commercial (OA) publishers and a pioneer of the article processing charges.” Others followed suit, notably the Public Library of Science, or PLOS, a San Francisco nonprofit, which popularized these charges as part of a larger response to paywall barriers. In the ensuing decades, publishers increasingly went all in. “Everyone was hanging their coat on the open access hook,” said Samuel Moore, a scholarly communications specialist at the University of Cambridge and author of “Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care and the Commons.” A PLOS Media video published in 2021 fictionalizes a thank you message from “the scientific world of tomorrow” to scientists who are choosing to publish their work in open access journals. _Visual: PLOS Media / YouTube_ As such, the disputes at Current Research in Environmental Sustainability illustrate much larger issues facing the entire scientific community. According to many critics, APCs represent one way the for-profit publishing industry turned scholarly research into a commodity — one criticized for its high profit margins. For instance, Elsevier’s past financial statements suggest its earnings before deductions for taxes and interest are close to 40 percent annually. “It is the only industry that I know of — other than energy — that makes a consistent 40 percent profit margin,” Marcum said. “And that is absurd. How are they able to do it? They’re able to do it by exploiting the prestige market and academic tenure of promotion.” The precise amount of public funding that goes to APCs is unknown. One small survey of researchers published in 2022 suggests grant funding commonly goes to pay APCs, and publicly available data suggest that the fees have grown. The National Institutes of Health currently estimates the average request to cover publication fees in 2025 was $3,000, or 0.8 percent of grant recipients’ total requested costs. “Authors don’t pay for it. The universities, the taxpayers, the grants, they’re the ones paying the APC fees,” said Kharrazi. “The academics don’t have $3,000 sitting in their pockets to pay for a paper. Usually what they do is they go shop around for journals that fit their budget coming from the grant or the fellowship or the university or something like that.” Kharrazi isn’t the first journal editor to voice objections to the fees. In 2015, the editors of the linguistics journal Lingua resigned en masse to protest APCs and other concerns. (They later founded the nonprofit open access journal Glossa. Others have gone on to do something similar — founding nonprofit versions of what amounted to the same journal but with lower fees.) Four years later, the editorial board of another Elsevier journal — the Journal of Informetrics — resigned in protest of APCs. Over the summer of 2023, at least two-thirds of the editorial board of Wiley’s Journal of Biogeography stopped work and then resigned; the reason, they said: “excessive” open access fees.​ > “It is the only industry that I know of — other than energy — that makes a consistent 40 percent profit margin.” During his time at OSTP, Marcum saw little data to support the system, and practically no evidence that justified its value. Publishers refused to open their books; such data, he said, would only underscore how inequitable the system is. But the available data, he said, suggested one thing: “It just doesn’t seem like it’s a system that works for anybody, unless you’re trying to make lots of money.” He said it should be incumbent upon the industry to demonstrate the value of APCs. The publishers and journals have continued to raise costs. Between 2019 and 2024, 40 percent of fees rose faster than inflation. And according to Schares, data suggest that APCs bear almost no relation to publishing expenses. “So that tells me that APCs are not set on really what it costs to produce an article there,” he said. “It’s more prestige.” The demand, he argues, remains because publishing has long been tied up in academic recognition. Outside of academia, as Marcum put it, the public should care about APCs not just because they want to read journal articles for free or because the science was produced using public funds. “Imagine your doctor doesn’t have access to the best available information right away. That’s what open access provides,” he said. “It’s a public good. And should we be charging the producers of the knowledge for a public good?” * * * In April of 2025, Bhattacharya, the NIH director, released a statement: A new public access policy would go into effect on July 1, 2025. The NIH joined the National Science Foundation in requiring authors receiving public funding to make papers publicly available immediately upon acceptance at the journal. That public access must include making manuscripts available through free, full-text archives of federally funded research, even if published by an open access journal. Federal agencies designate which to use, such as PubMed Central in the case of the NIH, or the NSF’s Public Access Repository. The access policy had initially been proposed in 2022 by the OSTP under the Biden administration, and had been slated to go into effect on Dec. 31, 2025. Bhattacharya decided to implement the policy almost six months earlier than anticipated. Then, in July, Bhattacharya took another step: He announced that federal authorities intended to target APCs. In a news release, the NIH director said that APCs were “excessive.” Some of the fees, he pointed out, reached nearly $13,000, which was widely understood to be in reference to Springer Nature, publisher of the Nature Portfolio journals. Later that month, the NIH sent out a formal Request for Information, listing several options: One option would scrap the use of NIH funds for APCs altogether, mirroring a policy some philanthropic funders have embraced. Several other options suggested a cap on APCs at $2,000, or $3,000 (if peer reviewers were paid), or a percentage-based cap on the grant’s total cost. Fritz, with the NIH media team, said data available through the Office of Science Policy was used to come up with the APC policy proposal. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya arrives to testify on the agency’s budget before a Senate subcommittee in June 2025. The next month, the NIH proposed capping APCs paid out of the agency’s grants, or eliminating the option altogether. _Visual: Win McNamee/Getty Images_ In response to a list of emailed questions, Eseohe Arhebamen-Yamasaki, U.S. head of communications for Springer Nature Group wrote that the “average APC across our more than 3,000 journals is about $2,000,” but did not directly address whether or not some of those fees can reach up to $13,000. A statement that Arhebamen-Yamasaki requested be attributed to a spokesperson noted: “When publishing Open Access in highly selective journals, costs are distributed across a smaller number of published articles, reflecting the rigorous review of all submissions — including those that are not accepted — to identify the most impactful research.” As an author, Kharrazi has also recently faced paying high APCs to publish in Nature journals. The “business model is everywhere and academics are pushed into it,” he wrote in an email. “The margins are great but volumes are thin I suppose.” Whether APC caps will work in practice remains unclear. “I don’t think that there’s great evidence that a policy like this would work,” said Alperin, the ScholCommLab co-director. “I don’t think that caps on APCs have been really tried, especially not on this kind of a larger scale.” He characterized the NIH proposals as haphazard, adding that they aimed at the problem but missed the mark. “People don’t see caps as the solution.” He argued for a more radical restructuring that separates scholarly publishing from revenue generation: “Why don’t we also use public funding to do the communication of the research?” More than 900 entities sent in formal comments on the proposed NIH caps. Few of those commenting publicly on the proposal appeared to support the caps, and the responses were divided. AAAS put out a statement noting that while it was important to explore alternatives to APCs, “it would be impractical and damaging to the U.S. scientific enterprise to ban APCs immediately.” ###### Get Our Newsletter Sent Weekly * X/Twitter This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. * Email* Submit Δ Meagan Phelan, the communications director at AAAS, noted that the organization both critiques and supports APCs. On one hand, she cited a 2022 survey, saying, “We’re concerned charging an APC could perpetuate inequities.” But AAAS charges APCs in some cases. The organization publishes six journals: Five are green open access, which retains a paywall but allows authors to freely post the accepted version; its gold open access journal, Science Advances, is free to read but has a $5,450 APC. “We could bump up the number of papers that we accept so that we could lower the APC from $5,450,” Phelan said. “But we can’t imagine going to our editors and saying, ‘You know that paper you weren’t going to accept? Well, now you have to accept it and please accept 10 percent more papers this year.’” “We still need to do our quality checks and recoup our costs,” she added. Other nonprofit publishers opposed the caps. The American Society for Microbiology said in a September 2025 statement: “The proposed $2,000 APC cap does not cover most publishers’ average costs to publish an article.” The ASM statement said caps could further incentivize publishers to accept as many journal articles as possible. But some advocated for the NIH to facilitate specific variations on open access, such as encouraging authors to publish early versions of the paper, or preprints, which lack peer review. Others have pushed for a model called diamond open access, in which peer reviewed papers are free for authors and readers, and all publishing costs are underwritten by alternative sources of funding from societies, institutions, or public contributions. MIT Libraries issued a public statement, urging, among other things, NIH support for “community-controlled publishing models such as diamond open access.” (Undark is an editorially independent magazine published by the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT.) > Whether APC caps will work in practice remains unclear. “I don’t think that there’s great evidence that a policy like this would work.” The industry appeared to support a percentage-based cap and called for the reinstitution of the previous NIH embargo policy, in which NIH-funded papers became open access after 12 months, according to statements released by the American Association for Publishers. “Publishers have created systems that feel seamless to researchers while handling millions of details to ensure scientific integrity, global accessibility, and long-term preservation of knowledge,” read a statement from The International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers, a lobbying group, the members of which include academic publishers. “APCs are one mechanism that supports this broader ecosystem.” For his part, Marcum, the former Biden official who co-authored the 2022 public access policy memo, said he understood why the federal government took action, but he questioned the focus on APCs: “To me, if you want to effect change in the system, you’ve got extremely strong tools that you could do that with already, including something called the Federal Purpose License. The NIH can just assert that it owns this content anyway because it funds it.” Or, he added, the government could enjoin antitrust lawsuits against publishers. Marcum also cautioned that there may be some unintended consequences for issuing caps, such as the collapse of the floor for APCs. “Let’s say they chose $3,000,” he said. “Well, about half of the journals charge less than $3,000 an article. There’s no incentive for them to continue charging less.” Which, he argued, won’t change the status quo: “They’re just going to find ways to get their money anyway.” Moore, the Cambridge researcher, agreed. “If the cap is quite low, that’s not going to change publisher behavior too much,” he said. It’s also possible that caps would further consolidate industry power — particularly under what are sometimes known as “transformative agreements,” or read and publish agreements, said Schares, the Iowa librarian. Under these agreements, publishers negotiate with institutions; these institutions agree to pay a certain fee to read paywalled journals and publishers in turn give out credits, which affiliated authors can use to waive APC fees and publish an agreed-upon number of papers with the publisher. “And so then smaller publishers get left behind,” Schares said. “They get bought out or enter an agreement with larger publishers to help them distribute their journals, and the consolidation will continue.” Others share this view: According to a public comment from the Association of Research Libraries responding to the NIH proposal, such proposals would further strain library budgets. And as David Crotty, an industry consultant and now executive director of a publishing house, has written: “It is expected that US federal policies will drive further market consolidation.” For his part, Kharrazi is among many journal editors who have questioned their relationship with commercial publishers in recent years. The NIH caps acknowledged these underlying issues. “Unless government pushes back and regulates the industry,” he said, “we’re just going to have less trust in science, more junk science, and dividends for the stockholders.”

"Sembra tramontata la stagione dell'"Open Science". Ora si moltiplicano le politiche di research security: basta condivisione, autonomia tecnologica, protezione dei sistemi..." Così sta scritto in un articolo apparso sulla Lettura del Corriere della Sera di Alessandro de Angelis. L'articolo si ri

Public Domain Day 2026 (web.law.duke.edu) 12-28  ↑ 100 HN Points

Each January 1st is Public Domain Day, when a new crop of works have their copyrights expire and become free to share and reuse for any purpose. Here's our highlights for 2026.

The European messaging service Zivver – which is used for confidential communication by governments and hospitals in the EU and the U.K. – has been sold to Kiteworks, an American company with strong links to Israeli intelligence. Experts have expressed deep concerns over the deal.