In May 2026, 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. We provide a statement on the proposals below.
We’ve also submitted a formal response via the Regulations.gov website and will share the link once it is public. In the meantime, you can read it in full here.
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The US government has picked up on some real issues in research communication, but the OMB’s proposals concerning the protection of scientific integrity, peer review, open science, and sustainable funding are off the mark in addressing them.
Publishing open access maximises the value of research by ensuring it is available to other researchers and the public as quickly and as widely as possible. This is why the blanket ban on using federal funding to pay article processing charges (APCs) is of particular cause for concern. APCs are not a problem in themselves: when they go towards publishing services that add value to research – through rigorous quality control and peer review as well as the wide dissemination of research – they provide an effective way to communicate new discoveries for everyone’s benefit. The problem occurs when publishing incentives reward researchers for publishing in luxury journals whose brand and Impact Factor are superficially linked to research quality. Public funding can, and should, support the costs of publishing research; it becomes a different story when it is used to pay a premium for journal name.
Removing the support for APCs doesn’t solve that problem, however. In grouping those prestige publishers together with mission-driven OA publishers, the OMB would simply create new barriers to open access – particularly for underfunded researchers who want to share their work with the world – ultimately limiting the impact that US research could have on the global stage. Research communication needs improvement – that’s been well established. But the current plans are problematic for everyone involved.
