Marco Pipoly

Last year, $9B of the $35B that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) granted for research was used for administrative overhead, what is known as “indirect costs.” Today, NIH lowered the maximum indirect cost rate research institutions can charge the government to 15%, above what many major foundations allow and much lower than the 60%+ that some institutions charge the government today. This change will save more than $4B a year effective immediately.

Major academic publishers are getting sued for unlawfully appropriating billions of dollars. Prof. Lucina Qazi Uddin, a neuroscientist at UCLA, has sued these six academic publishers Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Sage, and Springer Nature. The lawsuit claims that these publishers violate antitrust laws on the following three grouds: 1. The publishers have colluded to fix the price of peer review at zero. 2. These publishers agree to not compete with each by making it obligatory for researchers to submit their work to only one journal at a time. 3. These publishers prohibit scholars from sharing scientific advancements while they are under peer review, which can take up to a year. Here's a comparison of the publishers' revenue and what they pay authors and reviewers Elsevier: $3.9 billion Springer Nature: $2 billion Wolters Kluwer: $1.6 billion Wiley: $1.8 billion Taylor & Francis: $800 million Sage: $500 million They pay: Authors: $0 Peer reviewers: $0