The recording of last week's webinar - *"**Rethinking Innovative Open Scholarly Outputs: Practice, Recognition, and Impact**"*, is now available on our blog post <https://www.oaspa.org/events/rethinking-innovative-open-scholarly-outputs-practice-recognition-and-impact/> .
We are grateful to our chair *Magdalena Wnuk *and our panelists -* Ioana Galleron, Allison Levy* and *Frédéric Clavert* for all of their work in advance, during and after the webinar. We are grateful to attendees for their active participation and insightful questions.
I am wondering if there might be anyone who has any insight about what the cap will be that NIH are intending to introduce:
"NIH will introduce a cap on allowable publication costs starting in Fiscal Year (FY) 2026, ensuring that publication fees remain reasonable across the research ecosystem. The policy aims to curb excessive APCs and ensure the broad dissemination of research findings without unnecessary financial barriers."
I don't have any particular idea on what the cap will be but this Charlie Kirk interview with Jay Bhattacharya, Director of the NIH, provides more context.
https://youtu.be/Q7Xcn2zkydc?si=d4mGUoFtIif6vih0
I learned of this interview from https://www.the-geyser.com/nih-head-publishing-is-free/
Lisa
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe [log in to unmask]
On Wed, Jul 9, 2025, 11:59 PM Danny Kingsley <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hello, hive mind. > > I am wondering if there might be anyone who has any insight about what the > cap will be that NIH are intending to introduce: > > "NIH will introduce a cap on allowable publication costs starting in > Fiscal Year (FY) 2026,
Thanks for sharing that link, Lisa. In the latter part of the Charlie Kirk interview-the final few minutes, where they talk about the covid pandemic and open science-JB is saying open research will make it much harder for a small number of scientific elite to say what's true and false. But: we've had more research open than ever recently-including b/c all covid research (his area of concern) was open-and yet that didn't stop "few people dominating scientific discussion" (which Jay laments as a problem). Then Charlie Kirk adds that science was used as a tool to suppress liberty, during covid.
I’m on a couple of librarian email lists where people are speculating, but I haven’t heard anything from anyone who has reliable information. One person I know did say that they reached out to a contact at the NIH and would let us know if they heard back, but that hasn’t happened yet.
Oy vey. What a train wreck. It's heartbreaking that this community has invested decades in developing a nuanced understanding of scholarly publishing, only to overridden by someone with a clearly limited knowledge of how publishing works or what researchers want and need (the number of falsehoods Dr. Bhattacharya puts forward in this interview are too numerous to count). For example, "It costs them [publishers] nothing to put it [research] on the web." Mix this ignorance with Kirk's xenophobia (Springer is a "foreign company") and Bhattacharya's contrarianism (a COVID lockdown opponent who thinks Springer and Elsevier suppressed the truth during COVID)
With regards to the comment “It costs them [publishers] nothing to put it [research] on the web.”, it is interesting to note that despite funding from Real Clear Foundation, The Journal of the Academy of Public Health (the reliability and partisan bias of which I leave to your own opinion), of which Dr Bhattacharya is a founding editor, still charges a $2000 APC.
PKP is pleased to announce the launch of collaborations with SFU Master of Publishing Program and Lifelong Learning for new open publishing courses. We are now seeking community feedback.
The 3 new courses are:
- PUB 611: Making Knowledge Public - PUB 603: Journal Management and Editing - PUB 604: Technologies and Infrastructure for Academic Publishing
We (Joachim Schöpfel, Niels-Oliver Walkowski, and me) are excited to announce the fourth lecture of the Open Divide Lecture Series 2025/2026. It will take place on July 23, 2025, at 5:00 PM (CEST).
We look forward to the lecture: 🎤 “Long-Term Preservation of Open Access Publications: Facts, Current Practices, and Future Outlook” by Mikael Laakso.
