The debate over public access to federally funded research has long been framed as a false dilemma: either taxpayers pay publishers for access, or the science remains locked away. That framing is now under direct challenge as the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) rewrites the government-wide grants rulebook, proposing to make publication costs unallowable across nearly all federal agencies. This shift presents a clear opportunity to state what major commercial publishers have obscured for decades: paying article processing charges (APCs) is not a prerequisite for public access.
A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on federal research publishing costs documents an $11 billion market dominated by a handful of commercial publishers. These publishers have turned a bipartisan public-access policy into a lucrative revenue stream by levying APCs. The report projects that APCs will cost federal agencies and individual researchers billions more in the coming years, yet it concludes there is "no practical way" for federally funded researchers to comply without incurring these charges.
That conclusion is flawed. The federal public access mandate requires only that articles reporting on taxpayer-funded research be made immediately available to the public by depositing a copy in a federally designated repository. This can be done at zero cost. An author can fully satisfy the policy by following this guidance, with no payment to any publisher.
APCs pay for something different: a publisher-branded version of an article, often carrying an aura of prestige. For some authors, that may be worth the expense, but it is not what the mandate requires. Publishers should not be allowed to conflate the two, and agencies should not treat APCs as an unavoidable cost of compliance.
The price tags themselves are staggering—APCs can exceed $12,000 per article. These fees bear little relation to the actual costs of publishing. The largest academic publishers routinely report profit margins of 30–40 percent, well above the average S&P 500 company. APCs, drawn substantially from public research funds, directly subsidize those margins.
A pay-per-article system inevitably prioritizes volume over quality. The GAO report details how paper mills churn out fraudulent submissions, editorial boards resign over pressure to prioritize quantity over rigor, and one major publisher retracted more than 11,000 articles after systemic fraud tied to its APC model. This is the real-world impact of the "pay-to-publish" approach.
It is time to dismantle the narrative that paying publishers is the only route to public access. The federal government's obligation is not to protect commercial publishers or their profit margins. It is to ensure that the public, having already paid for research once through taxes, is not asked to pay again to read it.
OMB can make this clarity binding by explicitly stating that depositing a manuscript in a repository at no cost fully satisfies the government's public access requirement. It should also direct agencies to issue clear guidance on the no-cost deposit pathways already available. A rule that bars agencies from paying APCs but says nothing about what researchers should do instead merely pushes the same confusion downstream.
As Heather Joseph, executive director of SPARC, argues, the choice between paying publishers or losing access is a false one. Researchers can freely deposit their articles in federal repositories, and no agency should treat an APC as something researchers need help affording. Instead, it should be seen for what it is: a discretionary purchase that researchers are free to decline. The time for federal science funders to stop playing along is now.
