ORFG Submits Comments to NIH on Allowable Costs
In September 2025 several ORFG member organizations signed a joint letter in response to the National Institutes of Health’s Request for Information on Maximizing Research Funds by Limiting Allowable Publishing Costs. This request positioned NIH to institute policy regarding “price caps”; a monetary cap to the amount of grant dollars that may be used to pay for publishing related fees such as article processing charges (APCs).
The RFI garnered nearly 1,000 responses from the scientific and publishing community, available here.
ORFG’s response maintains:
Allowable cost models fail to solve the price problem.
Publishing and evaluation systems are currently bundled with the sharing of scientific outputs. They should be unbundled.
Robust open science infrastructures already exist and are being used and embraced by the scientific community.
Read the entire ORFG response here.
As we continue to read through the responses, we’ll be considering how ORFG and its members can continue to contribute to the conversation around open cost models, and the improvement of the open ecosystem for research.