By Paul Thacker at Brownstone dot org.

In an exclusive interview with The DisInformation Chronicle, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya explains his latest policy to control monopoly science publishers now raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers, while sometimes playing partisan politics and pushing fake narratives.

The NIH announced yesterday that they will soon cap the "article processing fees" that publishers can charge NIH-funded researchers to make their studies public and available to American taxpayers.

NIH funds much of the planet's biomedical science, but this research has remained locked up by pricey science journals that charge Americans expensive fees to read the results of the very studies they funded. The publishers of Science Magazine, for example, demand $30 to read a single study.

However, this changed recently when Dr. Bhattacharya demanded that journals make NIH-funded studies public as soon as they publish them. However, taxpayers are still on the hook, paying the "open access fee" that journals charge scientists.

In the case of the esteemed Nature Magazine, this means a $12,600 fee. Of course, scientists don't have thousands of dollars lying around for publishing fees, so NIH-funded researchers simply charge that cost back to the American taxpayer as part of their NIH grants. In effect, taxpayers get charged twice: first when they fund an NIH grant for a university professor, and second when they pay that professor's publishing fee to a science journal.

And this money quickly adds up.

The six largest science publishers charge researchers $1.8 billion in publishing fees every year, with American taxpayers soaking up a large portion of that money. NIH's latest policy will control these costs in the future, ensuring more NIH money goes to scientists and their research.

Dr. Bhattacharya spoke with me about the exorbitant costs researchers pay these monopoly publishers to get their studies out in the public, as well as the blatant games publishers play to promote partisan agendas that corrupt public discourse.

"You would expect that the top science journals in the world would have news organs that respected the truth," Bhattacharya says. "But unfortunately, both Nature and Science have science writers who report propaganda and often rumors."

We also discuss a corrupt study Nature Medicine published called "Proximal Origin" that the Department of Justice is now looking into, as well as prejudicial and unprofessional statements Science Magazine editor Holden Thorp made during the pandemic. Thorp's response appears at the interview's end.

This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.

THACKER: You guys recently released, or you sped up this requirement that all NIH-funded research must be made public when published. Why were we ever allowing journals to keep public-funded studies locked up as proprietary research?

BHATTACHARYA: It never made sense for the government to be paying for research that wasn't available to the public. My predecessor at the NIH, Monica Bertagnolli, instituted a program that…The NIH put a requirement on their funded researchers to only publish in journals that allowed the public access to the articles for free. For reasons I will never understand, that policy was seen as controversial.

Primarily, I think, because the journal industry is a big business. In fact, it's almost a monopoly power. Those interests had a big role in creating controversy over something that should have been obvious. Americans should have the right to read the articles that their taxpayer dollars fund.

This policy by Bertagnolli was going to go into effect in December, and what I did is I sped up the timeline to the beginning of July. We finally have a rational system where if the taxpayers pay for research it is available to American taxpayers for free, immediately upon publication.

THACKER: So what is this newest policy doing?

BHATTACHARYA: What I've se...