Readers may remember Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya. once Canceled for justifiable dissent from COVID overrreach, and now director of National Institutes of Health. In his new position, he has vowed to help restore open discussion in science.

Of course, that inevitably includes raising issues that many would prefer to shelve indefinitely (while engaging in the pious rhetoric of reform). One of those issues is the monopoly on science publishing. In an exclusive interview with him earlier this week with Paul D. Thacker outlines the problem and his proposed solution at Disinformation Chronicle,

The NIH announced yesterday that they will soon cap the “article processing fees” that publishers can charge NIH-funded researchers to make their studies public and available to American taxpayers.

NIH funds much of the planet’s biomedical science, but this research has remained locked up by pricey science journals that charge Americans expensive fees to read the results of the very studies they funded. The publishers of Science Magazine, for example, demand $30 to read a single study.

However, this changed recently when Dr. Bhattacharya demanded that journals make NIH-funded studies public as soon as they publish them. However, taxpayers are still on the hook, paying the “open access fee” that journals charge scientists.

In the case of the esteemed Nature Magazine this means a $12,600 fee. Of course, scientists don’t have thousands of dollars lying around for publishing fees, so NIH-funded researchers simply charge that cost back to the American taxpayer as part of their NIH grants.

“NIH Director Details Crack Down on Fees Monopoly Publishers Charge American Taxpayers,” July 9, 2025

Yes. Nature may charge more for a review of a book than the book’s list price on Amazon. It’s a profitable business; one article estimates that “globally, a total of $8.349 billion ($8.968 billion in 2023 US dollars)” was spent on Big Six publishing fees.

A big problem is that, for all this money, we aren’t necessarily getting quality science:

“You would expect that the top science journals in the world would have news organs that respected the truth,” Bhattacharya says. “But unfortunately, both Nature and Science have science writers who report propaganda and often rumors.” “Fees Monopoly Publishers Charge”

His view?: “Americans should have the right to read the articles that their taxpayer dollars fund.” But, while there has been progress in that direction, the down side is the journals have responded by charging authors ever more money to get their articles published. So what he is mainly achieving so far is taxpayers’ right to read what they pay for. But he is well aware that there is much more to be done.