What the publishers of Science don't want you see!
A few months ago, Science published a news article (“NIH’s proposed caps on open-access publishing fees roil scientific community,” Dec 12, 2025) about NIH's plans to limit the amount that grantees can spend on article processing fees (APCs). Combined with the new requirements on immediate release of federally funded research, this puts researchers in a tight (and expensive!) bind of how to publish their research, and the article discussed the problems and potential solutions.
However, in discussing the controversy, the article neglected to mention one of the main ways researchers can resolve this dilemma - publishing their research in peer-reviewed community-run journals (CRJs), and increasing the resources that that go to these very low-overhead journals! Unfortunately, the letter was rejected, hopefully not because of a conflict with the funding model used by Science itself. Take a look at it below!
----------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Editors of Science,
As co-managing editors of a community-run journal (CRJ), we were disappointed that your article (“NIH’s proposed caps on open-access publishing fees roil scientific community,” Dec 12, 2025) failed to discuss the growing number of efforts to sidestep the high costs and downsides associated with commercial and scientific society publishing while preserving high standards of peer review and academic integrity.
The ‘overlay journal’ – where preprint servers are used to host ‘published’ articles that typically have been subject to peer review – is probably the best known example of a CRJ, and these efforts were reviewed not long ago [Rousi and Laakso, 2022]. Other journals, such as our own (the Living Journal of Computational Molecular Science, livecomsjournal.org), operate as more traditional enterprises in that we host articles on our own website. There are commercial services available (which we use) to aid in organizing CRJs, from peer-review to production to hosting, but the costs for these amount to a fraction of multi-thousand dollar open-access charges.
We propose that scientists channel their frustrations into action by (i) publishing in a CRJ, (ii) volunteering for a CRJ as an editor or peer-reviewer (which scientists already do for traditional journals extracting large sums from the research enterprise), and even (iii) consider organizing a CRJ for their community. The latter task is greatly facilitated by the ready availability of policies and procedures on CRJ websites.
David L. Mobley, Department of Chemistry, University of California, Irvine, dmobley@uci.edu
Michael R. Shirts, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Colorado, Boulder, michael.shirts@colorado.edu
Daniel M. Zuckerman, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Oregon Health & Science University, zuckermd@ohsu.edu
Reference
Rousi, A. M., & Laakso, M. (2022). Overlay journals: A study of the current landscape. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 56(1), 15-28. https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006221125208
