Government Struggles to Afford Public Access to Scientific Research

Why it Matters

A consequential shift in how the federal government publishes scientific research is on a collision course with fiscal reality. For years, federally funded research landed in academic journals that charged access fees for universities, hospitals, and researchers. The work was done on the public's dime, but reading it often required paying again, rendering it publicly inaccessible. A 2022 White House directive aimed to fix that, ordering federal agencies to make federally funded research transparent by requiring immediate, free public access to newly published results. The problem: nobody adequately planned for the bill that would come.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), released May 21, 2026, finds that the shift to federal research public access could cost the federal government up to $1 billion per year in publishing fees alone, and that nearly every agency reviewed had failed to conduct even a basic analysis of what that would mean for their research budgets.

The Big Picture

In 2022, the Biden administration's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued guidance directing federal agencies to make the results of government-funded research immediately and freely available to the public upon publication. The OSTP public access mandate represented a significant departure from the existing model, one that had sustained the academic publishing industry for decades.

The intent was straightforward: research paid for by taxpayers should be readable by and available to taxpayers. The policy had broad support among researchers, universities, and open science advocates who had long argued that paywalls impeded scientific progress and public health.

But the shift created an immediate structural problem. If journals can no longer charge readers for access, they need to charge someone else. That someone is increasingly becoming the researcher, or the federal agency funding the work, in the form of article processing charges (APC's), fees paid upfront to publish in an open access journal.

What They're Saying

The GAO reviewed nine federal agencies with varying levels of research funding and found that many are largely unprepared for the financial burdens of the OSTP mandate.

Seven of the nine agencies had issued updated public access plans or policies. The Department of Transportation and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) were still drafting theirs at the time of the review. Of the seven that had updated plans, only five fully met OSTP's guidance. The National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture fell short specifically on reuse rights, meaning their policies did not adequately address how others could share, modify, or build upon the published research.

More alarming than the compliance gaps is the cost trajectory. GAO estimates that open access publishing costs could reach up to $1 billion per year for the federal government, and that annual costs could triple if historical patterns in publishing fee increases continue. That is money that would come directly out of research budgets, potentially reducing the volume or scope of the science that the government can fund.

Of the nine agencies reviewed, only the National Institutes of Health had developed a plan to manage these potential cost increases. Every other agency, including the Departments of Defense, Energy, NASA, the Social Security Administration, the National Science Foundation, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the NRC, had conducted no analysis of how rising publishing fees could affect their research programs or budgets.

The GAO did not limit its scrutiny to the agencies. It also examined a 2024 economic analysis that OSTP itself published on the effects of expanding public access to government research accessibility. That analysis, which might have served as a roadmap for agencies trying to understand the fiscal consequences of the mandate, did not fully reflect all five of GAO's key elements of a sound economic analysis. Critically, OSTP's analysis did not address the goal of estimating potential costs and other effects of the policy shift.

In other words, the office that issued the mandate also failed to rigorously account for the mandate's costs.

Yes, and

Beyond the budget math, the GAO report surfaces a concern raised by publishers and universities interviewed during the review: that pay-to-publish models may create incentives for journals to lower publication standards in order to accept more articles and collect more fees. If agencies are paying per article published, journals have a financial interest in publishing more, but not necessarily better, research.

This concerns the integrity of the scientific record itself. Federally funded research transparency is the stated goal of the OSTP mandate, but if the fee structure encourages lower-quality publications, the public may gain access to more research while getting less reliable science.

The Bottom Line

GAO issued 11 recommendations across nine agencies, all of them currently open. The recommendations largely direct agencies to conduct the budget impact analyses they have so far skipped, and to update their public access plans accordingly. OSTP was directed to conduct a rigorous economic analysis of its own 2022 guidance and to update that guidance based on the findings.

Four of the nine agencies concurred with the recommendations. Five offered no comments.

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