Starting July 1, Academic Publishers Can't Paywall NIH-Funded Research
46 comments
·May 1, 2025pelagicAustral
StableAlkyne
Sci-Hub was an incredible achievement. It was the closest humanity came to the interconnected sharing of knowledge we dreamed the Internet would be in the 20th century.
And they tried their hardest to kill it because journals believe they're entitled to extract a century of rent from work they did not perform.
pdfernhout
Something I wrote related to this in 2001: "An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society" https://pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Glad to see better policy happening -- even if all too slowly and only in some areas.
buyucu
Scihub is the best. They are doing a huge service to humanity.
dr_dshiv
Just saying, sci-hub (and libgen) has turned off in my country (Netherlands). Like, they block access at an ISP level — and all ISPs and phone companies are blocking it. I imagine there might be a measurable decline in academic productivity, at that point.
Anyway, the warning is: liberal free countries can stop these things if they want to.
So… it’s up to us the public. Why can’t university libraries make their books and journals properly accessible in a digital format, like libgen and sci-hub? Why can’t they make their whole collection RAG retrivable, for that matter?
int_19h
Is there an actual court order in effect, or is it some kind of tacit agreement between ISPs?
ulrikrasmussen
I've also had some trouble accessing them in Denmark. They're still available on Tor though.
buyucu
I recommend a good vpn, such as Mullvad.
But I agree, countries should not allow this kind of authoritarian practices.
jimbob45
Turned off how? Like a Chinese firewall kind of thing? Are you not able to simply VPN around the block?
mont_tag
This makes me happy. It was such an obvious right thing to do, but it took so long to come to fruition.
Next, it would be great if published standards were freely available. It is astonishing to me that they are not.
f1shy
Specially the ones with force of law
Someone1234
I agree; but then we need to come up with a different funding model.
Standards aren't free to publish and update, and currently the only revenue source is Pay-To-Access which most agree is problematic. The problem with government funded (e.g. funding the ones with legal enforcement), is that then we're picking winners and losers, and it may cause stagnation (or monopolies).
I don't like it. I also don't have a better idea.
nradov
That's not the only funding model. Many industry standards are free to access, for example HL7 FHIR. Their funding model is largely organizational membership fees, plus some additional charges for meeting attendance and training courses. This works fine. Several federal regulations mandate the use of HL7 standards for healthcare interoperability.
StableAlkyne
If your tax dollars are funding research, you should be entitled to reading the results.
I don't think I've met any other researchers who prefer paywalls. The problem is the most prestigious journals (Cell, Nature, Science, etc) have extremely parasitic business models - you pay a bunch of money to publish in them, and then other people pay them to read. But in return you get a CV boost.
They charge out the nose for open access (the researcher pays). With funding as tight as it is these days, maybe we'll see a shift to more a ethical publishing model as researchers start questioning whether it's worth it.
sadiq
This is good though it's not clear whether these papers will appear in the PMC Open Access subset (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/tools/openftlist/) and be bulk downloadable.
I've been doing some work with colleagues at Cambridge and Imperial over the last year on using LLMs to improve evidence synthesis, primarily trying to find papers on the effectiveness of certain Conservation interventions. It's becoming clear that you really need to move beyond screening papers only by title and abstract - there's often information buried deep within papers that can only be found with access to full text. My colleague Anil Madhavapeddy has written a bit about our adventures in trying to ingest full-text academic papers: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/uk-national-data-lib
shishy
Yes, it depends on what you're doing; for general paper discovery / search tasks, title abstract can be enough (which is also why Springer and Elsevier have been pulling even their abstracts from sources like OpenAlex).
But for something like that you need full texts to look into results sections. I'm very curious how you're dealing with information contained in tables, or if you're dealing with snippets of text from the full-text alone. Have you poked around Elicit yet?
spookie
Do you know of any ready to use alternatives to title and abstract screening? Wondering about it since I'm in the weeds of doing so.
tough
what do you mean exactly? I was suprised how with grobid many of at least the arXiv papers are easily converted to xml for better processing than PDF.
Most of the papers are constructed from their latex sources so there's an easy way to undo it i guess.
shishy
grobid is a wonderful resource, patrice did an awesome job (I used it at my previous job at scite.ai)
bananapub
I guess the punchline is the NIH won't be funding research then either?
burkaman
Yes, this same guy is helping "to cut more than 40% from NIH’s 2026 budget and pare its 27 institutes and centers down to just eight." - https://www.science.org/content/article/new-nih-director-def...
He has already fired over a thousand NIH employees and frozen or cancelled billions in grants in his first couple months on the job.
While we're talking about NIH, here's a fun game: try going to https://www.nih.gov/ and putting gender in the search box. Play around and see how many Forbidden Words you can discover!
marky1991
I've found so far: 'gender', 'diversity', 'equity', 'inclusion', as expected. Not: 'equality', 'socioeconomic', 'minority', 'ableism'.
Spanish is uncensored: Not censored: 'diversidad', 'equidad', 'genero' Censored: 'inclusion' (ha, same word as in english, duh) (Also 'inclusión', surprisingly)
It really doesn't seem to be a broad sweeping thing, mostly just 'DEI' terms forwarded in apache or something, which makes sense. That gender is included seems to be an outlier. (Though would be curious to see if you found any others)
burkaman
'pregnant people', 'transgender', 'nonbinary', and 'racism' are others I found
scarlehoff
Very interestingly, I tried to write "gender" and mistakenly wrote "gendea". The search engine, trying to be helpful, gave me: "No results found for 'gendea'. Showing results for gender"
And voilà, I just got 1666 (heh) results free from the censors!
burkaman
Note that the top result has actually been deleted though: https://www.nih.gov/nih-style-guide/inclusive-gender-neutral...
akovaski
> try going to https://www.nih.gov/ and putting gender in the search box
Compared to their other actions of censorship, this is such a small thing, but for some reason this in particular makes me distressed. Possibly because it shows how paranoid they are about letting out any information that goes against their narrative; that they're willing to do stupid, reckless things to control the narrative; that they enforce obedience to their ideology at all levels. It just seems like the entrance to a dark future.
It feels like they're trying to rewrite history... Which is a term I searched the Internet for, and funnily enough the first result was a blog post from the current White House administration. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/rest... (My other worry is that everything they accuse of others is a projection of their own intentions onto others. This seems less absurd every passing day. Otherwise this would be laughable.) So I guess the White House is explicit in they they're rewriting history to the True history. Thank you so much. Finally, we can be united under ONE Nation, ONE Truth, and ONE God. Sorry, I got a bit over-excited there.
For time travelers: searching for "gender" just directs you back to nih.gov, instead of directing you to the search results page.
trhway
>Compared to their other actions of censorship, this is such a small thing
while what is happening now is truly appalling, not all started with the current administration. NIH mortally self-wounded its scientific authority and credibility and even plain moral standing when they censored and thrown all their weight into suppression of the real source of covid - the leaked genetically modified gain-of-function-ed virus from the research in Wuhan sponsored there by NIH (and moved from US to Wuhan intentionally by NIH after recognizing how dangerous such experiments are).
codehalo
Typing "gender" in a phrase such as "sexual gender", "age and gender" works.
burkaman
Yes you can also just put "gender" in quotes and it works. Or you can spell it wrong - transgender is blocked, but you can do transgendr and it will correct your spelling and return results. Of course, some of the pages it returns have been deleted.
Presumably this was implemented by some developers trying to do the absolute bare minimum to comply with the absurd orders they were given.
rtkwe
So it's not just censorship it's bottom of the barrel dumb censorship too.
Finnucane
If you had an NIH grant, and then they cancelled the grant, does that count?
ziofill
[flagged]
ratatoskrt
Just to be clear, this is a Biden era policy.
ifyoubuildit
> I am excited to announce that one of my first actions as NIH Director is pushing the accelerator on policies to make NIH research findings freely and quickly available to the public. The 2024 Public Access Policy, originally slated to go into effect on December 31, 2025, will now be effective as of July 1, 2025.
Even if it originated with the previous admin, Jay Bhattacharya has decided to accelerate it. Seems like a good policy that both administrations agree on.
StableAlkyne
That it survived two administrations in the current climate is a miracle to be thankful for
throwawaymaths
you'd be surprised at how many policies survived two administrations. the real big one (unless I'm missing something or there have been CIA covert ops) is "not invading any new countries" (yemen conflict started under obama)
null
indoordin0saur
Seems like it'll stick around too. It aligns with the current administration's goal of financially starving the bureaucracies that surround research institutions.
StableAlkyne
The difference is that while indirect costs are critical to research in most cases, journals are the poster child when it comes to skimming research funding.
They provide little to no real value beyond a CV trophy and only carry out the bare minimum to coordinate peer review. Their largest impact is siphoning tens of thousands of dollars from labs, and millions from cash-strapped university libraries.
Even if the current administration wasn't attacking university funding, the publishing system is in desperate need of reform.
jeffrallen
...if there's any left:
null
As someone that went through university solely thanks to Sci-Hub I value any effort that can be put into making scientific papers more available. I would have never been able to pay for all the papers I had to access and, in my case, I only got a smoother experience using uni available content in my last semester, so...