Lawmakers Question Publish-or-Perish Culture of Research

As research fraud grows, federal lawmakers are looking for solutions to bolster the integrity of scientific research.

To help with that work, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology’s investigations and oversight subcommittee held a hearing Wednesday on the state of scientific publishing, calling on a representative from the publishing industry and two academic integrity researchers to testify about a range of issues, including paper mills, reproducibility and open-access policies.

While lawmakers expressed conflicting views about how best to improve public trust in research—and how the Trump administration’s policies may or may not help—they agreed that the problem is deeply rooted in the academic incentive structures fueling the $11 billion scientific publishing industry.

Representative Rich McCormick, a Republican from Georgia and chair of the subcommittee, set the tone during his opening remarks, casting academic publishing as a nefarious system.

“The result is a publish-or-perish culture that rewards quantity over quality and creates a ready market for shortcuts when speed and quantity displace rigor or reproducibility,” he said. “What was once a straightforward process of peer review and dissemination has become a complex, commercialized marketplace with maligned incentives and bad actors willing to exploit them.”

Although scientific publishing companies turn big profits by selling journal subscriptions, authors and peer reviewers are rarely paid for their work. Instead they are rewarded with tenure, promotion and career cachet. And those incentives have led to the proliferation of paper mills that are infusing the literature with faulty science—a problem that generative artificial intelligence is only exacerbating. At the same time, the number of retractions has also increased, though the overall retraction rate is about 0.2 percent.

Retractions and Reproducibility

But the fact that retractions exist “doesn’t mean science is failing. It means the scientific literature is being cleaned up,” Kate Travis, managing editor of Retraction Watch, told the committee. She added that more transparency and government oversight could help clean it up further.

“Too often, people checking claims are unable to access data sets—even those produced using public dollars. And likewise, those of us reporting on misconduct are unable to obtain materials related to investigations by the publicly funded watchdogs,” she said. “We need more investigations and more transparency around them.”

However, she added, last year’s budget cuts cost the National Science Foundation numerous personnel tasked with conducting those investigations.

Travis also suggested that the Securities and Exchange Commission could exercise a degree of oversight of publicly traded scholarly publishing companies. But most urgently, she said, “Science needs a reform of the publish-or-perish system, which perversely encourages and even rewards mischief and misbehavior. By relying on overly simplistic numerical metrics to tell us who is doing the best science, we dangerously conflate quantity with quality output [and] innovation and publication numbers with reliable knowledge.”

And that pressure to publish isn’t limited to scholars based in the United States. In January, the committee sent letters to numerous federal agencies raising concerns about “foreign-backed paper mills, including some linked to the Chinese Communist Party, in enabling fraudulent scientific publishing operations that threaten the integrity of U.S. taxpayer-funded research.”

At Wednesday’s hearing, Representative Daniel Webster, a Republican from Florida, raised the issue again and asked how federal grant-making agencies can filter out fraudulent research during the application process.

“Supporting the systems in place to identify misconduct is perhaps the best change that can be made,” Travis responded. But after staffing cuts to the offices tasked with doing that, such as the Office of Research Integrity, “they don’t necessarily have the resources to investigate and to take a closer look at the research that is being used … in those grant applications.”

Those and other massive cuts—and proposed cuts—to the scientific research enterprise were top of mind for Democrats Wednesday. Numerous committee members questioned how the cuts align with President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at restoring “gold-standard science” and public trust in scientists, which has yet to rebound to pre-pandemic levels.

A lack of funding is also standing in the way of addressing another issue lawmakers raised: A growing number of scientific studies can’t be reproduced, which Trump and his allies have pointed to as evidence of declining rigor.

Scientific publishing “is a very important gatekeeper for the public to ensure that the money that they’re spending through their tax dollars is being spent accurately, it’s being spent wisely and it’s not being spent to produce a predetermined outcome,” said Representative Nick Begich, a Republican from Alaska. “Are publishing standards and peer review so eroded that journals cannot validate or will not validate results prior to publication?”

Carl Maxwell, senior vice president for public policy at the Association of American Publishers, responded, “There’s not a lot of incentive within the academic world to do reproducibility studies.”

“It’s kind of a dead-end academic career, unless you can find the funding to support it,” he added. “If reproducibility is something that we’re really, really interested in, candidly, there has to be opportunities for young researchers [to do these studies.]”

That’s not something the government seems keen to support; in addition to slashing the federal workforce, the Trump administration has twice proposed sweeping cuts to scientific research and higher education. In the budget proposal the White House released earlier this month, Trump asked Congress to cut the NSF’s budget in half, reduce the National Institutes of Health’s budget by 13 percent and ban the use of federal funds for subscriptions and publishing fees for some academic journals.

The proposed ban on publishing fees—which journals charge authors to make their papers publicly accessible to readers without a subscription—follows the government’s implementation last year of expanded open-access policies, which require federally funded researchers to immediately deposit their accepted manuscripts into an open government repository. But it’s put some researchers on the hook to pay the fees. The NIH has similarly proposed capping article-processing fees, also as part of an attempt to tackle publish-or-perish culture.

But Representative Emilia Sykes, a Democrat from Ohio and ranking member of the subcommittee, said the issue is “in need of a scalpel, and this decree is a sledgehammer,” and that “cutting federal funds for publishing costs is only going to put a further strain on our universities and researchers, who are already under attack from this administration.”

She added that “pulling the rug from underneath the publishing industry carelessly will be a disaster for research integrity,” in part because “publishing fees contribute to high-quality peer review to ensure that research published in reputable journals is held to a high scientific and ethical standard.”

To that end, she said, “It is disturbing, though not surprising, that this administration is being so flippant about research integrity when high-quality research also often undermines [Trump’s] anti-science goals.”