On June 30, 2026, Attain Partners hosted Publication and Periodical Costs: Proposed Uniform Guidance Revisions and Institutional Implications, a live discussion examining the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)’s proposed revisions to Uniform Guidance §§200.454 and 200.461 and their potential implications for research institutions.

During the session, attendees submitted questions about the proposed changes and what they could mean in practice. We compiled many of those questions below, along with responses from our panel of experts, to provide additional context and perspective.

The Basics

What are §200.454 and §200.461 proposing to change?

§200.454 currently allows institutions to include subscriptions to professional and technical periodicals as allowable costs to federal projects (as direct or indirect costs). The proposed revision adds ‘academic’ to that list and makes all of them unallowable.

§200.461 currently allows article processing charges (APCs) and other publication costs when the work reports federally funded research and the charges are consistent regardless of funding sources. The proposed revision flips that default: publication costs, including APCs, become unallowable unless a specific federal statute requires them or the agency approves them in advance, on a case-by-case basis; subscription costs are unallowable, period.

Importantly, the proposed text states that a general agency requirement to make research publicly available does not count as authorization. That sentence directly forecloses the 2022 OSTP Nelson Memo as a basis for paying APCs.

Perspective: Gil Tran, Attain Partners and OMB Emeritus

When would these changes take effect, and do they affect existing awards?

The proposed effective date is October 1, 2026. It is assumed that the changes would apply to new awards issued on or after that date, with updated terms and conditions. Retroactive application to existing awards is not expected, but institutions should watch for agency-specific guidance.  There is a chance that some revisions may apply to current awards starting October 1, 2026, such as the new termination provisions in §200.340 or the prohibition of procurement and operation of drones in §200.216 (b).

Perspective: Gil Tran, Attain Partners and OMB Emeritus

Indirect Cost Rates

OMB says it isn’t changing indirect cost rate negotiations. So why does §200.454 matter for our F&A rate?

OMB states it is not changing the indirect cost preparation and rate negotiation process as currently laid out in the Uniform Guidance, Appendices III – VIII. But §200.454  and §200.471 sit in Subpart E, the cost principles used to build rate proposals. If academic journal subscriptions and publication costs are unallowable under those cost principles, institutions can no longer include them in the library component part of their rate proposal. Their exclusion would lower the negotiated rates.  

Perspective: Gil Tran, Attain Partners and OMB Emeritus

How should institutions respond if §200.454 is finalized as written?

Institutions will face a compliance choice. A conservative approach means removing academic journal subscription costs from F&A rate proposals now to avoid future audit risk. A wait-and-see approach means continuing current practice until the final rule is issued and agency guidance follows, accepting some audit exposure in the meantime. Legal challenges could mean uncertainty past October 1. Institutions that start modeling their exposure now will be better positioned regardless of the final outcome.

Perspective: Jeremy Forsberg, Arizona State University

Will we need to renegotiate our F&A rate, or does this take effect at the next NICRA cycle?

Changes to allowable cost principles generally affect an institution’s F&A rate at its next rate negotiation.  The changes will be included in future F&A rates that are not already predetermined in a NICRA. Institutions are not expected to reopen existing rate agreements or re-adjust negotiated rates. But those with rate agreements expiring soon face more immediate pressure, and all institutions should understand the impact on their library component before the next negotiation cycle.

Perspective: Gil Tran, Attain Partners and OMB Emeritus

Article Processing Charges (APCs) §200.461

What does an APC actually pay for?

An APC is an author-facing publication charge. It enables immediate open access deposit of the Version of Record. It covers peer review management, copyediting, XML formatting, metadata, indexing and discoverability in databases, DOI registration, and long-term digital preservation. It also covers the traditional costs of marketing and community engagement, which support a journal audience. The costs also assist in peer review, the mechanism by which the scientific community validates findings before they enter the record; it is how science self-corrects, catches errors, and maintains the standards that make published research trustworthy and usable. As funder mandates moved toward immediate public access, subscription-based business models have transitioned to hybrid or pure Gold OA to support publication costs.

Publishers also manage the retraction process when errors or misconduct are identified after publication, ensuring the scientific record is corrected and flawed findings don’t continue to be cited and built upon. Removing the funding mechanism for that process doesn’t eliminate the need for it. The federal purpose license (§200.315(b)) allows the government to reproduce and distribute a federally funded work, but it does not fund or replicate any of that editorial, technical, or scientific integrity infrastructure.

Perspective: Carl Maxwell, Association of American Publishers

Can we include APC costs in a grant budget and budget justification upfront—would that count as advance agency approval under §200.461?

The proposed §200.461(b) allows publication costs if approved in advance by the agency on a case-by-case basis. Whether a budget line item approved at the time of award satisfies that requirement is not clear from the proposed text. It is a reasonable argument — and it is exactly the kind of clarifying question institutions should raise in comments. OMB or the agency needs to specify what ‘advance agency approval’ means in practice. Note that the same precaution and clarification are needed for the allowability of conference travel proposed in §200.432.

Perspective: Gil Tran, Attain Partners and OMB Emeritus

Financial Impact

What will be the financial impact of removing library subscriptions from the F&A rate base?

Attain Partners’ analysis suggests the annual IDC recovery impact for a major research university could be in the millions, depending on the size of the federal portfolio and how the library component is structured.

Perspective: Hilary Craiglow, Attain Partners

If APCs become unallowable, where do those costs go? If the library component drops, what happens to library budgets?

The costs don’t disappear. It will mean moving a recoverable grant expense to an unfunded institutional obligation, potentially landing on an already-stressed library budget or being passed back to researchers who must weigh open-access compliance against other research costs. At the same time, if journal subscription costs are removed from the library component and institutions lose a portion of their indirect cost recovery, it could result in subscription cancellations and reduced access to the literature researchers depend on. The two provisions compound each other, and both pressures could land on the same budget.

Perspective: Timothy McGeary, University of Rochester

How much are institutions spending on APCs, and how do you track them? 

APC tracking is inconsistent. Charges flow from grant budgets, faculty discretionary accounts, department funds, institutional open access funds, and are sometimes waived through a library’s transformative agreement with a publisher. Institutions should search for their object codes across the general ledger to identify these funds.

Perspective: Jeremy Forsberg, Arizona State University

Are there other library costs that could be recovered through federal grants to offset the pressure these provisions will impose?

Yes. Libraries provide a range of research services, systematic review support, data management, that directly support sponsored research and, in many cases, can be directly charged to grants rather than absorbed in the library budget. Institutions that haven’t taken inventory of these services may be leaving recoverable costs on the table. Attain Partners and ARL, through their work with COGR, developed a Research Information and Data Services (RIDS) Inventory framework for this: attainpartners.com/news-and-awards/research-information-data-service-inventory/

Perspective: Jeremy Forsberg, Arizona State University

Open Access Publishing Compliance

The proposed rule seems to say the federal purpose license is enough for public access. Is it?

The simple answer is no. The federal purpose license (§200.315(b)) gives agencies the right to reproduce and distribute federally funded works, enabling deposit in repositories like PubMed Central. It does not waive the cost of article selection, curation, peer and editorial review to produce the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) to fulfill the current public access requirements for federally funded research. Peer review management, editorial services, copyediting, metadata, indexing in commercial databases, or long-term preservation infrastructure all have a cost, and APCs are one way of covering those costs. These are the services that make research findable and usable, and they are what APCs fund. Deposit in a government repository and full publication are not the same thing.

Perspectives: Carl Maxwell, Association of American Publishers; Timothy McGeary, University of Rochester

Does the federal purpose license conflict with standard publishing agreements?

It can. When researchers publish in journals, they sign agreements that govern how the work can be reproduced and distributed. The federal purpose license is a pre-existing government right, but it is nonexclusive; it does not override all publisher license terms. A researcher who has signed a standard copyright transfer agreement and then tries to deposit their published article in a government repository may find themselves in a legally uncertain position. The proposed rule does not address this conflict, and the license is non-statutory and legally untested. It is essential for all parties to the manuscript, including institutions, to clearly discuss and understand public access requirements, licensing and rights, and publishing costs well in advance of signing any agreements.

Perspective: Carl Maxwell, Association of American Publishers

The Nelson Memo requires open access; shouldn’t that authorize paying APCs?

Under the proposed §200.461, no. The proposed text states explicitly: ‘A general requirement to make results publicly available must not be construed as authorizing publication costs.’ The 2022 OSTP Nelson Memo remains in effect and still requires immediate, free public access to federally funded research; however, Nelson does not supersede OMB grant guidance. Under this proposed rule, institutions are left with the “open access” requirement and without an allowable way to fund the primary mechanism for meeting it through federal grants.  Institutions may want to explore with the federal awarding agencies alternative ways to satisfy the “open access” requirement outside the current publication practices. 

Perspectives: Gil Tran, Attain Partners and OMB Emeritus; Carl Maxwell, Association of American Publishers

What are a PI’s options for open access publishing without APCs?

A PI has a few options, none of them without tradeoffs.

Green OA

Submit to a journal that supports free author publication and deposit the author-accepted manuscript in an agency repository (PubMed Central, PAS-PAR, ERIC) or institutional repository after publication. No APC required. Authors are usually required to add metadata, indexing, etc., to the accepted manuscript to meet the full grant requirement; however, this route is generally accepted by most federal funders.  The published Version of Record with full formatting, indexing, and metadata stays behind the publisher’s system. Journals may not support this route without an embargo and may not publish authors with funder open access mandates.

Fully OA journals without APCs (example: Diamond, Subscribe to Open)

A number of fully open-access journals charge no fees to authors or readers, supported by alternative funding models. They exist but are not widely available across all fields. The options require the PI to understand their publication agreement rights, negotiate author deposit terms if needed, and take the extra step of making the deposit. Depending on the journal, the author may still be responsible for ensuring the article fully meets funder requirements.

Pre-Print Servers (e.g., arXiv, SSRN) provide a pre-peer review forum for researchers to discuss their work. Most federal agencies do not consider preprints as compliant with open access mandates.

Perspectives: Timothy McGeary, University of Rochester; Carl Maxwell, Association of American Publishers

Can researchers publish in an institutional open access repository or on publishing platforms as an alternative to paying APCs?

Institutional open-access publishing platforms and repositories are an appealing alternative, but they are not free to operate and do not fulfill the current public access requirements of the federal funding agencies. Staff, infrastructure, hosting, metadata, preservation, and discovery tools all cost money. Under the proposed revisions, those operating costs face a double constraint: they cannot be included in the library component of the F&A rate because §200.454 makes periodical and publication-related costs unallowable, and they generally cannot be charged directly to a federal grant because §200.461 makes publication costs unallowable at the grant level as well. The institution absorbs those costs with no federal cost recovery pathway. So, while an institutional publishing platform sidesteps the APC paid to a commercial or society publisher, it does not sidestep the cost; it just moves it entirely onto the institution, with no mechanism to recover it through federal awards.

Perspective: Timothy McGeary, University of Rochester

If these changes are enacted, how do institutions educate researchers about their publication options?

If the federal purpose license becomes a primary compliance pathway, institutions will need to significantly expand that education. They will need to help researchers understand what the license allows, how to negotiate agreements that preserve their deposit rights, and what the implications are for their open access obligations. Scholarly communications librarians are well positioned to lead that work, but they will need institutional support and coordination with sponsored programs offices to make it work at scale. As author facing fees become more standardized, research administrators and librarians will need to help authors understand funding resources as they consider publications, budget appropriately, as well as how to be compliant with funder mandates.

Perspectives: Timothy McGeary, University of Rochester; Carl Maxwell, Association of American Publishers

Next Steps and the Comment Process

Do public comments on §200.454 and §200.461 actually matter?

Yes. A strong administrative record of substantive comments creates a legal and procedural obligation for OMB to address what was raised before finalizing the rule. Comments that identify specific conflicts or ambiguity, like the tension between §200.461,  the 2022 OSTP Nelson Memo and the “Gold Standard Science” OSTP Memo June 23, 2025, or the ambiguity created by §200.454’s placement in Subpart E, are harder to dismiss than general opposition. Volume matters too, but specificity is what creates an obligation to respond.

Perspective: Gil Tran, Attain Partners and OMB Emeritus

What makes a comment on these two provisions effective?

The most useful comments are specific and grounded in data. That means: citing the exact regulatory language; explaining the practical consequence for your institution; quantifying impact where possible (IDC rate impact, APC spend, library budget effect); identifying conflicts with other federal policies; and proposing specific alternative language or requesting specific clarifications. If appropriate, propose edits to the proposed language. 

Perspective: Gil Tran, Attain Partners and OMB Emeritus

What should library directors do right now?

Three things: First, help your finance office model your institution’s exposure by identifying your subscription costs so they can understand what this would mean for your F&A rate and help identify your APC spend across funding sources. Second, engage your sponsored programs office and provost now and bring data. Third, help make sure §200.454 and §200.461 are addressed in your institution’s comment before July 13. If they aren’t, submit a library-specific comment. ARL has guidance to support both.

Perspective: Timothy McGeary, University of Rochester

What should sponsored programs offices do right now?

Start by modeling the IDC rate impact of removing subscription costs from the library component; your library colleagues can help. Identify your institution’s APC spend and assess what changes if §200.461 is finalized. Make sure your institution’s public comment addresses both provisions. And if it doesn’t, coordinate with your library to submit a focused comment on these two sections before July 13.

Perspectives: Jeremy Forsberg, Arizona State University