When President Donald Trump’s administration abruptly canceled federal subscriptions to Springer Nature journals this summer, government researchers across the country suddenly lost access to some of the most influential publications in science. News reports framed the decision as part of a broader narrative about an attack on science — and indeed, journal access is essential to researchers.
What the uproar really revealed, however, was something subtler but just as corrosive: the hidden economics of how science gets published and accessed. Most Americans don’t realize they are paying not once, not twice, but at least three times for the same body of research. Inside universities, this academic triple tax, as I think of it, is so normalized that faculty barely notice it, and they feel paralyzed to do anything about it. It’s woven into the daily routines of professors, grant writers, peer reviewers, and librarians. Yet it quietly drains billions of public dollars each year, enriching a handful of for-profit publishers while eroding the budgets of the very institutions that produce the research.
The first tax is obvious. Every year, taxpayers provide tens of billions of dollars in federal research grants. That money pays for experiments, equipment, travel, and often salaries for personnel, including graduate students. Grants also come with “indirect costs” — extra funds that universities use to sustain research infrastructure, such as maintaining facilities and paying staff who manage grant budgets. Put simply: For every dollar the National Institutes of Health spends on a grant, it tacks on another 30 to 70 cents to support the institution’s broader research enterprise.
Beyond grants, tuition revenue helps support laboratories and faculty salaries. But tuition is not entirely private money paid by parents, students, and scholarship organizations. A significant share comes from public subsidies, including Pell Grants, state appropriations, and federally backed loans. In short, taxpayers already underwrite much of the U.S. research enterprise before a single paper is submitted to a journal.
The second tax is less visible. Once the research is completed, manuscripts land on the desks of peer reviewers, who are almost always other university faculty. These scholars spend hours scrutinizing experiments, suggesting revisions, and sometimes doing this a second time on the revised drafts. Peer review is often meticulous and usually valuable (if imperfect); it provides the quality control that makes science work.
Inside universities, this academic triple tax is so normalized that faculty barely notice it, and they feel paralyzed to do anything about it.
But reviewers are almost never paid. Instead, their salaries cover the time they spend doing this work, which means taxpayers are indirectly financing labor that directly enriches publishers. One estimate valued this hidden subsidy at more than a billion dollars annually in the U.S. Yet, faculty may view it as an essential duty of the job, and universities then applaud this service without rewarding it.
The third tax comes when the finished product is published. Unlike journalism, where writers are paid for their work, academic publishing reverses the model: Researchers often pay to publish. Many journals charge article processing charges, or APCs, to cover the costs of editing, hosting, and dissemination. These fees can range from a few hundred dollars to $12,690 for a single paper in Nature if the authors want it freely available to everyone. Other journals, such as those published by professional organizations (such as the American Medical Association) don’t charge APCs but still keep articles locked behind paywalls for a specified time period for non-subscribers. Some journals, like those published by PLOS, are fully open access — every article is free to read, but the author or their institution always pays. Regardless, this money often comes from grants.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s 2024 report to Congress estimated that APC expenditures for federally funded research “averaged less than quarter of a percent” in the fiscal years from 2016 through 2022. But because the federal research enterprise is so large, even a sliver of the budget translates into hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it flowing to for-profit publishers. For example, the OSTP estimated that approximately $379 million of federally funded research money went to APCs in 2022 alone. Since neither universities nor publishers consistently report who pays which fees, the true share drawn directly from federal grants remains unknown (and OSTP admitted it may overestimate those figures). At the individual level, the American Association for the Advancement of Science survey data show 69 percent of researchers used grant funds to pay APCs, and more than three-quarters reported sacrificing laboratory equipment or materials for these publication fees.
When researchers do not pay for open access, the public must pay to read the article. For those without institutional library access, the cost is often $25 to $50 per download, which is prohibitive if you’re a patient searching for information on a new therapy or a teacher trying to bring recent science into the classroom.
For journals that are not fully open access, including many of the most prestigious titles, institutions must still pay subscription fees to provide access for their students and faculty. These bundles often cost millions of dollars per year and consume a considerable share of library budgets. As one example, the University of California system reportedly spends approximately $50 million on journal subscriptions.
Not every study is caught in all three loops of the triple tax. Some research is funded by private foundations or philanthropy; some requires little cost beyond faculty time. Industry-funded work, such as late-stage pharmaceutical research and development, follows a different economic model. But much of the basic science that underpins new therapies still begins with federally funded work, which means the public is effectively subsidizing the earliest stages before companies take over. Also, not every journal charges publishing fees. But, for federally funded science conducted within universities and government labs and published in major journals, the model has become the norm.
What makes this system uniquely strange is that everyone involved has incentives that financially benefit the publishers. Researchers advance their careers through grants and high-profile publications; universities tout faculty scholarship as a marker of prestige; and publishers create ever more journals to absorb this demand. Everyone feeds the machine, and the machine feeds on substantial taxpayer dollars.
The second component of the triple tax has started to crack as some academics are refusing to serve as unpaid peer reviewers, while others are too busy producing their own research to volunteer. With publishers continually expanding their portfolios, demand for volunteer peer-reviewers outpaces supply and manuscripts are all too often sent to scholars outside their direct expertise. The result: longer times to publication, lower-quality reviews, and an increasing number of retractions. This translates to slower, less trustworthy scientific progress, which erodes broader confidence in science. The public, in turn, is left paying three times for a product whose quality control is diminishing and whose access is rationed.
What makes this system uniquely strange is that everyone involved has incentives that financially benefit the publishers.
The triple tax model has persisted for decades largely because it is invisible to those outside of academia. The Trump administration’s blunt cancellation of subscriptions revealed just how dependent the system has become on this model — and how little the public understands the hidden economics behind their tax dollars. That decision has disrupted government scientists’ ability to make timely, evidence-informed decisions in the short term, but it could also be the shock that forces a broader reckoning with a system that bleeds universities, taxpayers, and public trust in science.
Change may soon come whether publishers like it or not. In August 2022, the OSTP issued guidance requiring all federally funded research to be made immediately open access by the end of 2025. The mandate doesn’t mean that every scientist must suddenly pay publishers’ APCs: Agencies can comply by expanding public repositories like PubMed Central. But if publishers succeed in steering researchers to comply with the mandate by publishing in their own open-access journals, the costs will still be passed along through taxpayer-funded grants.
Another path is already taking shape with journals following a “Diamond Open Access” model. Though distinct from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s call for government researchers to publish in new in-house journals, the underlying principle is similar: Publishing is free for both authors and readers, and is collectively supported by a consortia of universities, governments, or scholarly societies. The question now is whether these shocks to the system will spur genuine reform — or simply shift the triple tax to a new collection point.
James Smoliga, D.V.M., Ph.D., is a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine who studies translational science, sports medicine, and how scientific evidence is applied in clinical practice and public health policy. He writes the Substack newsletters “Beyond the Abstract,” about the intersection of research, academia, and society, and “Human Limits,” focused on sports science.