A Modest Science Proposal

How universities can offset NIH overhead cuts - stop paying journals

“It is a melancholy object to those…”

While many are reeling from Friday’s updated NIH policy that caps grant indirect (facilities & administration or F&A) overhead costs at 15%, a significant amount of this loss can be offset by one simple trick:

Stop paying for biomedical journals.

Found on the internets, source unknown

What once was a quaint but critical element of science - the interpersonal communication of scientific theory and findings along with feedback on the same - has morphed into a monstrosity. The Republic of Letters gave way the Royal Society’s precursor of the modern system of scientific professional society peer-review and publishing more than 300 years ago. Since World War II and Vannevar Bush’s “Science: The Endless Frontier”, modern editor-refereed, peer-reviewed scientific publishing has become the parasitic entourage of science, serving some purpose but at a cost well exceeding its value.

Concisely explained by Stephen Buranyi in his insightful article, “Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?”

“Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.”

This last piece of the triple-dip - selling the product back to the university scientists in the form of licenses for paywalled journal access - makes up a significant chunk of the universities’ indirect expenses.

Stop paying it.

The exact cost annually of the universities buying back the reports their government funded scientists created, with additional government funds that just got cut, is a bit hard to calculate exactly. Why? Like the indirect F&A rates that NIH standardized to 15% (they had previously ranged from the 38% my university got, to the upper 40s% average for HBCUs, to the low 60s% average of Ivy League School and other top grant recipients [my calculations from publicly available F&A rates at each university]) the license deals given to universities by the publishers are different, and not publicly available. As Derek Lowe noted at the end of his article, “Scientific Journals: Who Pays What?”

“Elsevier, though, drops its prices for smaller universities more quickly than many other publishers, and for Master's-level schools it's actually a better deal than many of the nonprofit publishers. We wouldn't know this, though, if these authors hadn't dug up all the info from FOIA requests, and I guess that's the take-home here: scientific publishing is a very opaque, inefficient market. And the publishers like it that way.”

We know India paid $715 million dollars in December for a 3-year “deal” to have all of its university students have access to more than 13,000 paywalled journals from different publishers - so the amounts we are discussing are not small. From Lowe’s article, updating for inflation and F&A rise, along with a survey of other sources; I would put the cost for the AVERAGE Research I and Research II university at around $5-10 million per year and quickly dropping off for other, smaller research programs. There are about 300 Research I & II schools in the US, so that means there would be $1.5 to 3 billion (that’ billion with a B) paid in journal access by universities using indirect costs. Certainly, not all of it is biomedical, but that area is both highly funded and very expensive when it comes to journals, so I would expect perhaps $1-2 billion of the cost to be in this area [all back of the bar napkin here, happy to adjust if someone has real numbers].

The NIH cuts are slated to reduce indirect payments to universities by $4 billion a year.

Stop paying $1-2 billion per year in journal access to offset much of this.

Additionally, if universities stopped paying the publishers to publish these reports - there are about 1 million articles a year added to the curated, biomedical PubMed database and each has a few thousand-dollar fee to publish - the whole NIH cut in payments could be almost completely off-set. This would have other implications on the non-monetary system of science, but we are working on that (note the title of my Substack is “The Unjournaling”). More to come on what’s next for unjournaled science. You can support me here:

There is lots of free science out there - why are we paying again for what we have already produced? If there are some critical paywalled articles you still need, an Interlibrary Loan through the National Library of Medicine will be a cheaper option. Fewer citations of paywalled articles means lower h-index for paywalled articles and less incentive to publish in paywalled journals.

Stop paying for journal access. You’ll offset the NIH cuts, and the system will reset.

Cheers!