This week DeltaThink released a report looking at the potential impacts of the long-awaited NIH plan to cap grant recipient spending on publication fees, particularly article processing charges (APCs) for open access (OA) publication. The report suggests the NIH’s policy (depending on how it is implemented) will result in a decline of somewhere between 0.9% and around 3.5% in the global amount paid for OA publishing. But the raw numbers don’t really tell the story of what will happen with such a policy, and it’s worth thinking about the reasons why it will be much less impactful than it seems.

The NIH is not alone in looking to change the way researchers publish their results, nor in looking to regulate publisher business practices. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has announced a policy specifically aimed at around 30 “high-profile, high-fee” OA journals including Nature Communications, Cell Reports, and Science Advances. Other funders have gone further. Cancer Research UK last month announced that they were generally fine with a 6-month embargo on papers becoming available via Green OA and that they would cease all payment for OA APCs. Since January 2025, Wellcome only pays for APCs in fully-OA journals, and at the same time, the Gates Foundation ceased APC payments across the board. Within each of these policies is an implicit (and sometimes explicit) goal of using the power of the purse to change researcher publication behavior and to restructure research communications, whether pushing authors away from journals deemed excessively expensive to eliminating subscription journals altogether.

How effective are these policies?

A quick look at Dimensions suggests they’re perhaps not having the intended effect, and that significant numbers of researchers are finding workarounds. In 2025, there are 10,298 papers that list Wellcome funding. Despite a requirement that all results be published OA, there were still nearly 700 subscription-access-only papers. The percentage leaps in 2026 to date with 323 subscription access papers published out of a total of 3,394. Further, Wellcome specifically bans spending on hybrid-OA, yet 3,104 Wellcome papers in 2025 and 1,051 to date in 2026 were published OA in hybrid journals (more than 30% in both years).

Gates, which similarly requires OA publication and won’t pay any APC at all, shows a similar leakiness in its results. Of 2025’s 3,717 papers listing Gates funding, 425 were published as subscription articles (11.4%). More than 900 papers were published OA in hybrid journals, and the most popular destinations for Gates funded papers were journals from Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley (followed by PLOS, with whom Gates has an agreement granting prepaid publication for funded authors). 2026 numbers are even more problematic in terms of compliance, with more than 20% of the year-to-date 1,150 articles listing Gates funding published as subscription-only articles. Elsevier and Springer Nature journals remain the top targets for Gates-funded authors. Gates requires researchers to preprint their articles and has built their own VeriXiv preprint server for this purpose. 2025’s numbers show only 1,305 preprints (35% of the number of articles) and 2026 shows 412 preprints (36%). Of those preprints in 2025, 459 were posted in VeriXiv (35%) and in 2026 around 39%.

What’s going on here, and why are these policies less effective than expected?

Everyone wants to keep their funder happy, right? So, why aren’t researchers moving away from hybrid journals, paying expensive APC journals (507 Wellcome and Gates papers published in Nature Communications in 2025), or paying any APCs at all?

First, as we know from the earliest OA policies, compliance is expensive and often complex to monitor. Unless the funder ruthlessly cracks down on grantees, some level of non-compliance will always be there.

But aside from some baseline of completely non-compliant authors, Lisa Hinchliffe in 2024 noted one reason why the rules aren’t carefully adhered to — individual funders do not exist in a vacuum. Many papers list funding from more than one source, and while an organization like Gates or the NIH may want to strike a blow against journals they perceive to be expensive, authors with funding from other sources can subvert their intentions and still remain in compliance. As the aphorism goes, “a slave with two masters is a free man.”

Another key workaround for funded researchers has been provided by the rise of transformative agreements (TAs). TAs, also often called read-and-publish deals, bundle payment to the publisher for read access to subscription content and payment for OA publishing for authors into a single contract. If an author is at an institution that has signed a TA with a publisher, then the APC for that author’s article is no longer coming directly out of their grant.

This means that the funder has zero control over publication spending because it is being done by the institution’s library, not the grant recipient. Most libraries operate through a variety of funding sources, ranging from tuitions and student fees to grant overheads. Even if a particular funder outlawed any of their overhead funds from going to TAs, the library could simply pay for TAs using funds from other portions of their budget. Problem solved.

And as we know from the Plan S obituary, TAs favor hybrid journals over fully OA journals, resulting in the opposite outcome that funders are aiming for here. Further, TAs favor researchers at larger, wealthier institutions that can afford them, and the largest, most profitable commercial publishers who have the scale to make TAs work. Should the NIH eventually announce their APC caps, I would expect to see a rush of TAs signed in the US, similar to the rapid uptake in the EU following the implementation of Plan S. The rich (researchers/institutions/publishers) will get richer, again — an unintended, but entirely predictable consequence.

Whose money is it anyway?

The other factor that prevents funder policies from steering researcher and publisher behavior is the disconnect between the person receiving the funding (usually the lab’s Principal Investigator or “PI”) and the person doing the actual research and writing the paper (usually a graduate student or a postdoc). The grad student/postdoc is eventually going to leave and (at least for the small percentage of researchers who stay in academia) start their own lab. But they don’t get to take the PI’s funding with them, that stays with the PI. The PI is the only one with a vested interest in keeping the funder happy. The student/postdoc gains no benefit from funder compliance and, instead is focused on doing what will provide the maximum career advancement potential — essentially publishing in the highest impact journal possible, regardless of the cost or any clash with their PI’s funder’s wishes.

I wrote about the conflict of interest this creates for lab heads back in 2019. The PI has a duty of care toward their students and postdocs, to do everything they can to help them launch a successful career. Any lab that adheres strictly to the Gates policy, for example, and declares that a preprint is the only necessary output for a research project, is going to be a lab devoid of graduate students or postdocs. Why would you go work somewhere that prohibits you from getting that Nature paper (or any paper at all) that you need to get a job?

At the same time, the PI needs to keep the lights on in their own lab and is obligated to follow their funder’s rules, regardless of how damaging it may be to their students’ career hopes. Most are left with a difficult balancing act, and that’s why we see so many workarounds that follow the letter of the law but not its spirit.

And so, as Lisa Hinchliffe wrote, these sorts of policies do little other than to increase the compliance burden for researchers and, as cOAlition S noted, often have the opposite effect from what was desired. As I’ve written elsewhere, policy is a blunt instrument which is usually goal-focused rather than process-focused. So, while the DeltaThink numbers are interesting, I’m willing to bet that the real-world impact of the NIH’s potential APC caps will be significantly smaller in terms of the reduction in overall publication spend, and significantly larger in terms of further market consolidation.