May 2026 saw the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) put forward proposals to revise 2 CFR Part 200, otherwise known as the Uniform Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance. The proposals have prompted significant discourse among the research community globally, with almost 500,000 responses submitted by the end of the public comment period on Monday, July 13.
On behalf of eLife, our Chief Publishing Officer Fiona Hutton compiled and submitted the following response to the proposals. We have also published a brief statement here.
Subject: eLife’s Response to OMB-2026-0034-0001
eLife is a mission-driven not-for-profit publisher that champions the "Publish-Review-Curate" (PRC) ecosystem, aiming to create a fairer, more accountable, and decentralized scientific publishing system that returns power to the research community. We are driven by the belief that science must be open, transparent, and guided by a collaborative community-driven approach to improve the quality and dissemination of content in order to provide a higher return on investment in that research.
Although the stated objective of the OMB's proposed updates is to enhance transparency, accountability, and oversight regarding the utilization of Federal taxpayer funds within Federal grant-making, the current OMB’s proposed revisions are a direct threat to the independence of scientific inquiry and the survival of open science models. There is a need to preserve expert and non-political review and maintain sustainable financial support for the open science ecosystem.
Protecting Scientific Integrity and Peer Review
(§200.202) & (§200.20) The proposed modifications are a direct challenge to scientific discourse. By granting political appointees authority over individual grant awards and rendering peer review non-binding, the OMB is installing a mechanism for ideological vetting. Such interference has a corrosive effect on the research enterprise, systematically devaluing expertise and replacing objective evaluation with political alignment.
- (§200.202) Requiring senior political appointees to exercise "independent judgement" on every award sidelines domain experts and wastes expert reviewers' time.
- (§200.205) Removing the binding nature of peer review undermines US research quality. Expert evaluation must remain the definitive standard for scientific quality and improvement.
Ensuring Open Science and Sustainable Funding
(§ 200.461) eLife views the proposed cessation of federal funding for Article Processing Charges (APCs) as part of grant expenses as problematic to the whole research ecosystem. There is a dangerous conflation occurring between legitimate, mission-driven publishing costs and the predatory, volume-based exploitation seen by some commercial entities. A blanket restriction fails to target commercial exploitation; instead, it devalues non-profit organisations and mission-driven publishers who utilise APCs as a critical mechanism for publishing services that act to maintain rigorous quality control, research integrity, review, curation, and enable wide dissemination, discoverability and interoperability of research. Because legacy subscription publishers can leverage historical library agreements as viable routes to publish OA through model amendments, fully open-access, mission-driven community-based publishers will be excluded from the market.
- Financial Barriers: Ending support for publishing fees (§ 200.461) would create significant barriers for U.S. funded researchers, particularly those at less wealthy institutions, effectively deprioritising and hiding their contributions from the global scientific record. Essentially, if federal funders remove financial support through open access (OA) but require openly available research, the OA fees won’t drop but the visibility of content from underfunded researchers will. Barring the use of Federal funds to pay for APCs directly conflicts with established agency public access policies that permit such costs to facilitate free and immediate access to research results. This prohibition disrupts academic communication and creates a negative effect on research dissemination, pushing that research back to opaque and paywalled proprietary venues which cannot be accessed or utilised by the global research community.
- Impact on Innovation: The proposed restrictions on "Professional Memberships" (§200.454) and conference attendance (§200.432) isolate researchers from the collaborative networks essential for innovation, collaboration and return of investment.
We strongly urge the OMB to withdraw these proposed changes and reaffirm its commitment to the independent, peer-reviewed, and open scientific inquiry that has defined US scientific leadership, working within a framework that supports and sustains mission-driven not-for-profit organizations that are imperative to the preservation, advancement, and global integrity of scientific discourse.
