Researchers at Princeton and across the nation who receive federal funding have had a tumultuous year. Come Wednesday, they have one more thing to balance: a new federal public access policy that could cost researchers thousands of dollars more to publish in academic journals.
The new public access policy, known as the Nelson Memo, was released under the Biden administration in 2022 and mandates that any research that is funded by federal agencies be made publicly available at the time of publication. The memo is set to take effect across all agencies by Dec. 31, 2025 at the latest, although the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Energy, and NASA, among other agencies, have already implemented a version of the policy.
The Nelson Memo follows a similar policy released in 2013. The 2013 policy, however, applied only to federal agencies with over $100 million in annual research and development spending, and allowed a 12-month embargo for papers being made publicly available after initial publication. The 12-month embargo maintained journals’ ability to rely on subscription revenue from those seeking immediate access to papers.
Making research publicly available immediately upon publication, as is required by the Nelson Memo, can be costly for researchers, as many journals charge substantial fees to offset lost subscription revenue when papers are made public-access. The fees for Nature, for example, can be upwards of $12,690 per paper, while Science Advances charges authors a fee of $5,450 per paper.
But the University has not yet committed to cover the fees, known as article processing charges (APCs), going forward. Some Princeton researchers, however, don’t think it will matter.
“We are closely monitoring this and continue to work with and provide guidance to our researchers on their publications consistent with federal guidelines,” University spokesperson Jennifer Morrill wrote to The Daily Princetonian in response to questions about whether the University would cover APCs.
Princeton received $455 million in government-funded grants and contracts, including from the Department of Energy and the NIH, in the 2024 fiscal year. Grants valued at $210 million were suspended by the federal government in the spring, although around half the total was reinstated over the summer.
For many labs, making their research available to the public is well worth the price. Many researchers told the ‘Prince’ in interviews that the University should not be solely responsible for bearing inflated costs imposed by the journals.
“There’s a temptation to put onus on the University, and maybe that is the right place, but it feels to me that this is a journal-level problem, that journal margins seem to be made through author costs that supply open access,” Kristopher Nichols GS, a Ph.D. candidate in the Psychology department, told the ‘Prince.’
“We pay the amounts right now because we do want things to be open access,” Professor David MacMillan, a 2021 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, told the ‘Prince.’
“The second thing we do … on our website, we publish all of our papers so that anyone can access them from all over the world for free,” MacMillan added. “This is new science. It should be available to anyone who is curious enough to want to read it.”
Princeton also maintains agreements with 10 publishers to reduce or waive APCs for Princeton researchers. The University also ran a pilot program beginning in 2020 that covered more than $500,000 in APCs and book processing charges across 224 publications. It has since been discontinued due to budget constraints.
“Publication fees in astrophysics can be substantial, and for some researchers, they present a significant barrier,” Caleb Lammers GS, an astrophysics Ph.D. candidate, wrote to the ‘Prince.’
Lammers recalled facing difficulty finding financial support for publication costs as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto and having to rely on journal discounts and research advisors instead.
Joshua Isaacs GS, a Ph.D. candidate in Geosciences, characterized the new federal public access requirement as “naively optimistic given the exploitative nature of publishing.”
“Nobody should have to pay to publish, and nobody should have to pay to read,” Isaacs wrote to the ‘Prince.’
Some researchers and departments at Princeton already have long-standing practices of making their research immediately available to the public. For researchers who already do this, the Nelson memo won’t change much.
Professor Michael Strauss, the chair of the astrophysics department, told the ‘Prince’ that the department routinely shares papers on preprint archive arXiv, often posting manuscripts before they are formally accepted for publication.
“We basically make it open access even before it gets to the journal,” Strauss said.
Strauss added that a vast majority of papers published in the astrophysics department are in a group of journals under the American Astronomical Society, which made its entire collection of journals fully open access in 2022. “We’ve gotten used to the open access part,” he said.
Researchers in other departments, such as sociology and computer science, also choose to make their research publicly accessible, whether via an archive or choosing to pay APCs during publication.
Despite the funding debate, the new policy may not meaningfully affect Princeton’s research output.
“We’re at Princeton; at other universities, it might be totally different,” Nichols said. “I don’t think that people here are going to stop publishing.”
Lammers wrote that Princeton graduate students are “largely insulated” from paying out of pocket for publication fees anyway, with advisors or labs often covering APCs.
“I think this latest round of rule changes does not have an immediate effect on us. It’s not going to make it even more difficult to publish than it did before,” Strauss said. “The devil is in the details, of course, but speaking in the abstract, open access is definitely a good thing.”
“I think it’s totally normal that taxpayer-funded research should be open to the public,” Nichols added. “The cost is the only substantive issue.”
Sena Chang is a senior News writer and Features contributor for the ‘Prince.’ She typically covers town topics and campus unions. She can be reached at sc3046[at]princeton.edu.
Victoria Davies is a head News editor for the ‘Prince.’ She is from Plymouth, England and typically covers University operations and the Princeton University Art Museum.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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