Profiteering from the publication of taxpayer-funded research is unethical and the U.S. Congress should act now to make it illegal.

Despite decades of pushback from the scientific community, the vast majority of publicly-funded research remains behind paywalls, inaccessible to most of the world’s population except for a select few currently employed at major research universities in Europe and the U.S.

Paywalls also hit already-marginalized students and researchers in the U.S. and abroad the hardest, and represent a huge source of inequality generation in the sciences.

Currently, academic publishers charge researchers thousands of dollars to publish their papers, expect those same students and professors to review their colleague’s papers for free, and then charge the public to read the research they already paid for.

Using this business model investors like BC Partners and the Holtzbrinck family made $440 million in profits in 2020 with a profit margin of 22.9% with their Springer-Nature family of journals.

For comparison the entire 2020 NSF Environmental Biology budget was $141 million.

For comparison the average profit margin of large U.S. corporations is 7.9%.

These profits come directly from taxpayers, student tuition, and school donations.

BC Partners now want to take Springer-Nature public with an IPO valued at over $7 billion.

This is profiteering plain and simple. Academic publishers should be nonprofit, not filing for IPOs using money from taxpayers, student tuition, and school donations.

As a bonus, this will relieve pressure on researchers to communicate science to the public since the public can now read review papers and primary literature directly. Scientists lose credibility when the public tries to see research on climate change or virus transmission and it’s locked behind paywalls.

Most voters would agree that profiteering off of taxpayer-funded research is wrong and that publicly-funded research should be equally accessible to everyone.

Elected officials in the U.S. House of Representatives can and should take action on this issue. The scientific community tried its best, but cannot do it alone. We need a legislative solution.