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STM goes to Washington: The Scientific Method Meets the Political Process
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STM goes to Washington: The Scientific Method Meets the Political Process
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
Hi, everyone, thank you all for sharing this hour with us. We know that the conference is always jam packed with very good things, and we appreciate you sharing your time with us. My name is Tom Ciavarella. I'm head of Public Affairs for frontiers. This is the third consecutive year at SSP that you've given me the privilege of being the moderator of this panel.
Thank you for the continued interest in the three years that we've been doing this, the political climate has gotten weirder and weirder. So there's a lot to cover. And so with that, I'm going to keep my introductory remarks very short. I will just say for level setting. And as a reminder, we're all going to be abiding by the SSP code of conduct during this meeting.
We would love to hear your questions. I'm going to open up as I'm doing now. We're going to have the panel introduce themselves and then speak a little bit. I might have a follow up question or two, but we want you to ask your questions. We want to make sure there's enough time for that. When you do ask your questions, please identify who you are, who you're with.
I will ask the panelists as well, just to repeat a little bit, to just so everybody understands the context of the question. Thank you again, all of you, for being here without actually, before we get started, round of applause for our panel for sharing their time. Tony, can we start with you. Would you mind just letting everybody know a little bit about who you are and what you do, and maybe giving us some Washington, DC level setting.
So where do we find ourselves. As of half an hour ago, let's say, as Tom has been, this is a very. As Tom has been alluding to this is a very transitory time for federal policymaking down the road in Washington, DC. Just by way of background, my name is Tony Hobbs. I'm a lobbyist down in DC with a firm called platinum advisors. We had the pleasure of actually representing the frontiers team for a little while down there.
That's how we were connected with Tom and those guys. We are not a science or publishing focused firm. We're a multi-client firm. However, we do have quite a few folks in our shop who are specialists in this area. I am not one of them. I am much more of a generalist on this kind of thing. So I'm going to keep everything pretty high topic and then let everybody else dig in to some of the more gritty details on this stuff.
As Tom mentioned, I'm here to set the stage on what's been going on in Washington. My normal presentation for this is about an hour and a half long of just me spinning off what's been going on for the last 95 days. Obviously not going to do that with you guys. I figured it'd be a lot better just to give you an inside sense of where the motivation behind a lot of these actions are coming.
I think most people are probably pretty caught up on what actions are happening. Washington Post, New York times the Hill, rags. They're all doing a very good job of keeping up with these changes as they happen. You'll notice there's not a lot of predicting going on in Washington, DC as a lobbyist. My least favorite words are I don't know when I'm asked what's going to happen.
It's when I've been saying and my colleagues have been saying more and more and more. The ultimate cause for all of that is a consolidation in decision making, and that is a theme that is permeating throughout the Trump presidency, particularly in his second term. If there's one thing that I have seen between his first term and his second term, is that President Trump has truly learned from the roadblocks and the obstacles that he hit when he was trying to make drastic changes on the first time, and he is changing his tactics and his strategies in order to affect more change in the rapid fashion that he is just naturally accustomed to.
There is that kind of Trump whiplash effect. He moves incredibly quickly. He can be a bit brash. That is his personality. That is genuinely who Donald j. Trump is. That is not an act. That is not some kind of facade that he puts on. He does use it as a bargaining chip, but it's not something that he's putting on superficially.
So when he gets belligerent, when he gets a little flustered, when he gets a little blustery, that is him. He's not really calculating these actions or activities. So the expression that I like to use a lot is do not take Donald Trump literally, but do take him seriously. When he says things like, I'm going to kick every foreign student out of Harvard, the folks in this room are well aware of the rules and how this works, and that he probably cannot legally do that.
And in fact, we know he can't legally do that through executive Fiat. Is Donald Trump serious about wanting to put the screws on Harvard and really affect how they do their admissions process. 100% and he is going to find avenues in order to extract concessions from places like Harvard when he feels they have lost alignment with his priorities. So since he's learned from the let me back up, the lessons he learned came about mostly from two major battles he had.
The first was, as this group will be very familiar with was during COVID. His battle with what he considered the experts Doctor Fauci, the other folks within the NIH and within the federal bureaucracy who he went kind of on a political battle with on a day to day basis. I'm here to tell all of you that if you believe that Donald Trump has been chastised by that process or has changed his thinking, I'm sorry.
He feels fully and 100% vindicated in his actions during COVID. He truly believes he did the right thing, and that it was other folks who caused any downstream consequence, whether that's shutting down schools, mask mandates, things like that. The other fight that he had during his first term was what against he referred to as the deep state. This was your national security apparatus, your ingrained bureaucrats who were fighting against his initial agenda.
I bring those two up because to me, when we look at the actions and activities he's taking now in this second term, they all come back to in his mind, righting the wrongs that occurred during that first term. So he's going after the experts and he's going after the deep state. And what that looks like in the news cycle is he's going after academia and he's going after the bureaucracy, bureaucratic workers in Washington, DC, and he has two major mechanisms by which to do that.
He can do that through funding, and he can do that through personnel. When it comes to the agencies, very black and white, pretty straightforward. He has tried, with middling success to cut grants programs direct spend from agencies to programs that he does not like. And when it comes to personnel, he had his soft firing or what do you want to call it, the voluntary leave.
He has tried to force some folks out again with middling success, based off of which court seems to get there first. But his overarching goal is to consolidate that decision making within the bureaucracy and bring a lot of that day to day activity into the Executive Office of the presidency. Now, when it comes to battling his experts or the experts, his other nemesis, we're seeing that a lot in academia.
Harvard, of course, is the poster child for that kind of fight, I believe just today, again, another court has said he can't block students from applying to Harvard. What we're going to end up seeing now that he has had his flurry of activity, is the courts actually have an opportunity to catch up to a lot of these actions that he's taken, and quite frankly, he's going to lose on the merits on a lot of these.
Now there's going to be an appeal process. So I think we're going to be looking for most of the summer at various decisions that the president made in his first month or two, going back and forth between appellate and district courts as they get kicked back and forth. And many of these will work their way up through into the Supreme Court. I'm not going to pretend or try to guess as to how this Supreme Court will act.
I will just say, if there is concern that this is a rubber stamp Supreme Court for the Trump administration, I think I can assuage that fear quite a bit. These are hardcore conservatives on that bench, for sure, but they are not Trump acolytes or there to do his bidding. They are absolutely going to align in a lot of places and change drastically, particularly how environmental and energy policy is regulated at the federal level, but this court is not interested in drastically changing how jurisprudence at least works here in the country.
That brings us all the way up to just activities that have happened, particularly with health and Human Services Secretary RFK jr. He's a weird one. Well, no no, no. Beyond beyond the obviousness of that statement. He is he's an interesting pick. Let me put it that way. He is not a traditional conservative when it comes to health care.
He's not, if you listen to him, his senior advisor, a gentleman by the name of Carlie, means he has his sister. Doctor Casey Means who I believe is up for the surgeon general posting. These are very influential folks in President Trump's orbit when it comes to health care, when it comes to food and nutrition. If you listen to any one of them speak in a vacuum about food and nutrition, you would swear they came out of my New England progressive House Office up on Capitol Hill.
It is. We need to move away from treatment based and look towards preventative medicine. We need to focus on food as an aspect of health care. Pretty progressive policies, frankly. What he has been able to do is go up to President Trump, who is your quintessential dealmaker and doesn't really have a strong stance on anything, and convince President Trump that this was the popular and the populist stance to take on food and health.
President Trump is concerned primarily with popularity and winning his elections and maintaining his mandate to govern. So when RFK jr. came to him and said, look, I have a way to bring a new coalition of voters who really care about these issues into your camp. President Trump has embraced them wholeheartedly. So this is a very interesting coalition over at HHS. It is not a right wing coalition whatsoever.
What it is, however, is uniquely targeting the pharmaceutical industry as the Public Enemy number one of health writ large. Again, as a progressive, I usually hop up and down and say, that's awesome, that's awesome. Like, we're finally going after the pharmaceutical companies. However, the methods and the techniques that they're going to use to do this are not something you see out of any kind of Democratic administration.
They will very much be the Trumpian way of doing things, which is direct mandate where possible, and then many fewer carrots than sticks when it comes to reacting to folks who do or do not respond. So that's a general overview of how this administration and HHS is looking at these things. I think we'll get more into as we go on into President Kennedy or sorry, there's a Freudian slip for you into Secretary Kennedy's recent statements on publishing.
We also have a recent executive order from the White House on gold science that we'll get into the nitty gritty, but I do these activities, too, are all coming from this sense that President Trump really does feel like he has a bone to pick with academia and the expert class that sets scientific policy, and he is going to utilize his bully pulpit and the awesome power of the federal government to bring them to heel.
Tony, thank you very much. And this group here is being seen as a part of that expert class. We've always thought of ourselves as doing good work, and we do good work. And we wondered sometimes who paid attention to it. Well, now it's getting attention, not the attention that we would have hoped for in other administrations. But I wonder if you could talk to you a little bit about that.
So given that foundation that we've just heard from Tony, this is where we find ourselves over the past five months. How is that specifically playing out day to day for publishers. So when I was on that cheerful note. I will dig into the way that I've been categorizing these issues because as when I checked a month ago, there were more than 130 executive orders, and they're constant.
So how do you start to think about this as a publisher and the impact that it might have on you. And I have what I call the four winds of change that are blowing and those winds of change I've grouped as research funding in the US establishment people and norms, the issues around language and particularly things like trust in science and geopolitics. And so those are my four major categories. Not to leave anything out because I have thought of how different issues fit in those categories.
And in the US, the research funding has been shifting already, and it's been shifting away from federal funding to more investment in private by private industry. And so when you look at federal funding, that's been pretty flat for us. So that's a known situation that we've been dealing with. The new changes here are the drastic cuts, the potential shifting priorities which could be leading to more interest in issues like national security and phrases like American AI dominance, as opposed to where the patterns were moving previously.
And so, what I see on that research funding side is the massive cuts are really the biggest issue that we're constantly facing, and they're likely to impact everything we do. They're also likely to impact compliance checks. So when we start to talk about open science and those issues where who's going to check that compliance if 50% of the staff is gone. And that is not only us as in publishers, but it's the entire research ecosystem, including universities and those kinds of issues.
And the Congressional Research services had a may 2025 report on University expenses and an expectation that would be changing. So that was one. Research funding. Two is establishment people norms all being upended and all at the same time that you're looking at, well, this can be replaced by tech or AI. So if you think about the major changes at the agencies, it's not just the leadership of those agencies, which often changes when you have a new president, but it's actually a lot of times the entire senior leadership of agencies that have changed.
And those large cuts in staffing are possibly going to lead to brain drain. And we know all of the countries around the world that are already raising their hand in Hong Kong and the EU and France, a safe place for science, all of these initiatives. But really you can even see the changing norms in the fact that there's a feeling that academic freedom is being attacked.
At the same time, academic freedom is being defended at certain agencies as the standard we need to rise towards. So the traditional way that grants were awarded, if you think about peer review, the peer review panels, that has also been changing. There's been exploration with prizes, with portfolio contributions that were going out from DARPA. People focused kind of recognition as opposed to research grants and peer review.
So we're in this world where basically the establishment and the norms are all upended, and that includes the people that we've always worked with and partnered with as publishers on the trust in science issue and so die we know has taken a massive hit. And I think that's all being done together collectively that the DEI policies have taken a hit and words are being put forward such as gold standard science and transparency and openness and replication, things that quite frankly, we agree with for the most part in publishing.
However, it's the implementation that matters, and it's all centered around fostering the American public trust in science that is the core, the moral high ground that is being argued from this. And it's largely following on COVID. As Tony said, if you look at the players and who they are. There was a lot of discontent during COVID, and there were scientists who felt shunned, and policy health experts who felt that their views were not being heard.
And that's coming to the forefront. So we're living in this reality of playing all of that out. The OSTP memo held, as we've seen with NIH accelerating that to July 1. But how any of that happens within this framework of massive cuts is a question. And then my fourth and this is the one that I think we often just sort of downplay because we feel we have no control over it is geopolitics and the regional dynamics.
The US and China collectively are 43% of the global GDP. And anyone who is sitting here and thinking, it's not going to affect my journal because it doesn't publish a lot of US or China authors, or I can substitute B, and C is missing the entire potential of this relationship and the importance of that relationship to us. 43% of the global GDP being impacted is going to impact all of us and everything we publish, be it a book, a standard, a database, a journal, whatever.
So I think that's an area that we really need to focus on more. And I'll pause there. Absolutely thank you very much. Again, there were just headlines this morning about students from China. And, how the State Department is going to start to look into them. And we have been concerned about who is going to be available to be on campus or to just be in the country.
And it is wise that the four pillars that you're looking at, that's one of them. I want to circle back to trust in science, though, because we in this room think of trust in Science a very specific way. And we don't just say it. We do live it through the peer review process, through the way that we publish, through the transparency. We really do believe in trust in science.
Karen, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, because you deal specifically with disinformation and misinformation, and I would love to hear you. You brush up against our world. The Federation of American Scientists definitely fits in with this World, which is why we're so thankful to have you here today. But you also have a lot of other concerns as well that we'd love to hear about.
Yeah, I'm so glad to be here today. And I'm Corinna from the Federation of American Scientists. And I think that we have two perspectives here, because at the Federation of American Scientists, I work on our AI policy team. So we spend a lot of time thinking about AI and emerging tech policy and where that's going in Washington, DC but then we also spend time thinking about the broader science and tech ecosystem in the United States and try to envision where we're going.
And I think that the main thesis that I would bring here today is that we are in a broad crisis of public trust in science and scientific system in the US. I would also link this back to COVID, and it's interesting because I pulled some numbers showing that Pew Research that I think we're at 10 points lower in the measurements of public trust in science and scientists than we were in 2019. It actually started to go up a little bit in 2024, but overall, we're still in a much worse off place than we were before COVID, and I think that there is historical precedent to that.
Oftentimes during pandemics, no matter how they go or how they are handled, there is a mass loneliness and isolation that comes from going through that period that I know that all of us remember well. And of course, some level of what happened in the scientific community there as well, probably didn't help things too. So I think that's one place that we're starting from. And then I think that what we are seeing from the Trump administration is a certain faction of that camp that is now empowered to carry out a level of grievances that have developed over the past few years, both during COVID and before COVID.
I think that one thing we are trying to look at to the future is what these funding cuts and this the demolishment of grant funding and also the threats that are being levied against universities and international talent too, is what that's going to do to the research ecosystem in general. We don't think that those things are good. Likely going to see a major chilling effect. Even just the threat, even if these things are not carried out.
We anticipate a significant drop in international talent, both new talent coming in as students, even if they continue to be permitted to. But then also the huge population of folks who are working in science and tech in the United States who are not born in this country. Those are essential folks that may not see this as a place where they can continue doing their research and thriving. Even if they are not technically booted out.
And we think that is a major problem that we are facing. And one that won't help us in the mission of building back that public trust that has been hurt. We also think domestically this is going to hurt domestic talent pipelines, as new researchers are finding their careers cut off before they may have even begun, or find projects broken before they have a chance to grow. I think that another important thing that I want to bring up here, given my background in AI policy, is that all of this is happening not just in an unstable political environment, but also at a time of major technological expansion of artificial intelligence.
And of course, there are a range of views of how transformative this technology is going to be, many of which are valid. And honestly, nobody has a crystal ball of where this technology is going to go. But we have seen marked increases in the capabilities of these general purpose models that have accelerated over the past several years. And so it is likely that those capabilities will continue to grow to some extent.
And I think it is also notable that many folks in power, both in the Trump administration and outside. See this as a national priority and are increasingly securitising this issue. You're hearing calls for a Manhattan Project to develop artificial general intelligence a disputed term, but that it's likely that we will be seeing more resources put towards US technological development in this realm, possibly through things like public private partnerships.
We saw the Stargate announcement where Trump struck a deal with OpenAI and other folks to I think, Channel $5,500 in towards the development of AI, all private money, but with a public hand in it. So I think we will see more things along those lines. And just for this AI conversation in general, I think it's really relevant to the public trust angle. I'm sure we have all had experiences either working with AI ourselves, seeing outputs from other people.
And we know that there are significant problems with hallucinations in these technologies, even as they've gained more capabilities often in the quantitative realm. Newer models from OpenAI from DeepSeek are reasoners, as they're often called, and are very good at some of these quantitative tasks, like coding. I think OpenAI is O3 is reaching the 175th best competitive coder on the planet.
So they're very good at some tasks, less good at general purpose tasks. And as they've advanced, they're also much worse at hallucinating, honestly. So we are seeing this technology where it's very easy to produce vast amounts of information that looks like it could be right. And it may not be. And you need a close and discerning eye in order to tell what is true and what is not true.
The problem is we do not have those structures in place yet. We do not have federal legislation in place for AI regulation. There are many proposals that are on the table, but it is unclear where that is going in the Trump world. And I'm sure we can talk more about that later. But yeah, I think that's what I would say is that in this new realm of the artificial intelligence gaining capabilities and more often diffusing through the ecosystem and more folks using it for their research, for their writing, it is very important for people in the publishing community to be thinking about establishing the right frameworks and responsible governance techniques in order to ensure that research integrity is not harmed throughout that, and to keep that lens of public trust should not be threatened by the expansion of this technology further.
So thank you very much. I think we're going to have a lot of questions from the audience about the specifics of that in terms of the licensing, in terms of the tariffs. But, Tony, I'm wondering if you could speak to the legislative part of it. Yeah so on the. I particularly thank you for reminding me. So the reconciliation package that the house had just recently passed actually has within it a 10 year moratorium on any state AI law.
So, just this administration is unafraid of new technology in a way that we have not seen and wants to utilize unproven technology in a way that we have not seen. It's with artificial intelligence, with Bitcoin stablecoins. It really is. I would call this a bit of a Musk effect. He has pretty high minded, engineering minded folks around him helping him on this decision making, but it doesn't really fit the Donald Trump personality for him to be so invested in AI and so invested in cryptocurrency.
But here we are. It's just very interesting that the house is going to acquiesce to him on this and most likely give him a blank slate to work on AI policy. Yeah, and I'll just jump in and say that there has been a bit of a shift in the Trump administration's policies on AI from his first administration to now. I do think part of that is maybe the Musk effect.
But in his first administration, he passed two executive orders, I believe, on artificial intelligence and actually laid some of the groundwork for early standards and R&D development. That was then carried forward by NIST and NSF. So there was some early work done by his administration that was not in this progress at all costs mindset. In fact, some of the language that was incorporated into those early executive orders included things like words like safety, words like responsible frameworks and the kind of framework I think even equity, I think equity and civil rights were mentioned in a way that is very hard to imagine.
Now you'll see they also approach AI with this public trust framework, and any comments that they have made around regulation have been, we need to make sure the public trusts this technology, that it works. So there are some roots there. But I will say there's been a pretty significant shift from the first Trump administration to the second in terms of the way that they are approaching AI.
And it's very much more, yeah, progress at all costs these days. Yeah I just wanted to make one comment. I mean, I guess the good side of this is that on the copyright front in court, the first court decision of Thomson Reuters basically went in favor of Thomson Reuters against OpenAI and Microsoft. I'm sorry, Thomson Reuters for the Westlaw product against Ross analytics and the New York Times and the copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.
So those two things went in favor. But as Tony pointed out, there are other things that can happen. And so the Library of Congress staffing firing was believed to be tied into some of those copyright stances that were being taken. And so he's leveraging that personnel firing ability in that case. Thank you very much.
I would like to ask one follow up. And then I would like everyone, if you have some questions to start thinking about it. We do have a mic in the middle of the room. Do not hesitate to queue up. I wanted to ask about the executive order that was dropped just before Memorial Day weekend on gold standard science. It had a lot of data in it about reproducibility, about what this administration's definition of science is, and might not always jive with what we think of as science or research in this room, but would love thoughts from any of you on just having read through that.
It is still early days. We're all everyone in this room is still adapting to what it means, but your thoughts on it would be much appreciated. Yeah, I'll do a quick start. So I read it on Friday afternoon. I put it aside and read it again last night. Also watched the video interview that RFK did on the impossible human podcast, where he referenced the potential for no longer publishing in major medical journals like New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet and Jama, which we all know are quality, quality outlets.
And that the government might start their own journal. And then the third thing that I would suggest that you look at is the interview with Michael Kratsios of OSTP that Marsha McNutt did, where he speaks to gold standard science. I mean, the words are really great, and I think you will find yourself, as I did, a bit torn about that piece of it until you go back and read the executive order and look at some of the exceptions.
And we were I think that was in section 7. We were trying to remember which section it was in some of the exceptions to standards which we know gold standards. You don't get exceptions that get to be made by political appointees. So I think it's the implementation of this. It is something that they're building on and taking a bit of a moral high ground and that it's absolutely tied into COVID.
But I do encourage that you read that executive order. I think it's worth everybody in this room read. And I find it very interesting. This is an executive order written in the language of open access. Clearly, somebody with a good grasp of this issue was sitting down in that room when they were working on this document with the president. It goes back to he has a very different health in NIH crew in that executive office of the presidency than he did in the first term.
They are aware of these terms. They know how to use this language. I share, I think the general consternation, as I think I've made it pretty obvious I'm a Democrat here. I read that executive order and the tingle went up in the back of my spine. No good comes from an executive order that is worded that vaguely. That was done with something in mind.
I don't think anybody really has a firm grasp on what he was looking forward at when he had that crafted out. I have an uneasy hunch we're going to find out quite soon. Yeah, I think the only thing I'll add here is that when the executive order came out, I was like, this sounds so familiar. And it is because Kratsios had also given a speech at the National academies a few weeks before the order dropped, where it was also centered around the gold standard for science.
So they've been floating this for a while. But I think that the interesting parts of that speech to me that stood out is that the he's talking about how we need creative mechanisms for science funding in the US. We need to be more creative because in his thesis he's putting forward is that scientific progress has stalled. We are bleeding money, we are spending too much and we are spending it on the wrong things.
And that some of the hints he gives about what the alternative the administration is more interested in is one public private partnerships. Also creative uses of money through things like prizes and challenges. And then also accelerated grant programs and faster funding mechanisms that my mind goes to things like eager grants and things like that. But I'm not sure if that's what he had in mind.
But I think it's interesting looking at those specific examples of alternatives. And is what I always do is in these speeches and these executive orders is like, yeah, what are they pointing to that indicates what they might be moving towards. Does anyone have a question that they would like to pose. You can think.
You can think on it if you like. I certainly have a bunch. I wanted to talk a little bit if we could, about tariffs, not just because it's constantly in the news, but because we are at a different industry meeting, the STM meeting in April, when there was the big announcement about the tariffs and there was a concern a number of publishers in this room are multinational. Things are being shipped all over the world.
There was concern about what that was going to do for the physical products. And then there were some of us who were like, well, we don't do anything in print. We don't need to worry about this, do we. And then the president made a strange comment about movies and tariffs on movies, and that got us thinking about, oh, what does he really mean. I wonder if you could speak a little bit to that, Tony.
Yeah, absolutely. I actually had that in my notes, so I'm you brought that up. Trump wants IP included in tariffs. End of story. He thinks that intellectual property is a good that is traded and has monetary value. And as such, it should be taxed as other goods are. It's obviously much more complicated to do it than I just kind of laid it out there.
But that is his underlying philosophy on intellectual property. We saw it very clearly, as Tom said, with the Motion Picture Association when he was going after Canada. He found out there's a Canadian film credit for Hollywood to go up there and do some filming, and it drove him nuts. He wanted it killed instantly. And he was ready to go into a trade war, using that as one of his main lines of fire.
So intellectual property should not, I think, be excluded during these tariff talks, just as a level set. I'm sure everybody saw a couple of courts over the last 24 hours have actually tossed the vast majority of President Trump's tariffs. President Trump was using what was known as the International Emergency Economic act. I got that wrong. Ieepa is an act in Congress that gives the president authority to do short term tariffs in a national emergency.
Trump interpreted that to state that we are living in a constant state of national emergency and that he was able to utilize tariffs basically at will. We have a special court system in the United States called the United States Court of international trade. It is basically our judicial body designed to handle international trade disputes that don't make it to the WTO. With us not really being a part of that.
They're kind of covering all of our trade law at the moment. That 3 judge panel just recently stated that the president does not have the authority to use IEEPA to do blanket tariffs. So the tariffs that were immediately hit by that were reciprocal tariffs, the 10% across the board tariffs. And the Canada and Mexico fentanyl border control tariffs. All of those tariffs were being done under that IEEPA. So we are back to a state of uncertainty and flux influx as State Department and customs updates the Harmonized Tariff Schedule to redo all several hundred thousand items that are on there for New tariffs.
I don't as a lobbyist, I never say this, but I've been saying it over and over. If you import things, get a trade lawyer. They are worth their weight in gold. It is incredibly difficult to keep up with the changes. CBP trips over itself every now and then. Now, when it comes with trying to figure out exactly what that percentage ad valorem is on these tariffs. So please do talk to some counsel.
That would be my only solid advice there. That makes sense. Darla, I wonder if I could ask you to speak to the publisher. Thought on this. If now IP is going to be tariffed publishers of all sizes, what do they have to think about. Or what do they have to plan for. Knowing what Tony just said, it is all up in the air, but what do you have to think about aside from getting counsel in this moment if it's really going to be IP is tariffed.
I love how you threw that at me, and the only thing I would say is I need two Martinis before I can answer that. I don't know that I have a lot to add here other than council on the tariff issue. I think it is. It is obviously something that we have not had to face. It's not been an issue. And yet here it is. And I think again, it's that upending the entire norm approach that's being taken is nothing.
Nothing is nothing is an institutionalized process for us. I can speak a little bit, however, to the OSTP memo. I mentioned that briefly. And just a note. One of the things I've heard over and over again at these publisher meetings is, oh, well, it's only going to apply to grants moving forward. And I just want to remind everybody that the NIH policy goes into effect July 1, and it is retroactive.
It's going to apply to publications moving forward. But remember, research grants are written many years beforehand. And so we have a lot up in the air about that we need to be considering and weighing. And those of you who are thinking about depositing to PubMed central and does your agreement cover it, really need to get on the ball with that.
So that would be a practical piece of advice that is not answering the tariff question. Thank you. Yes, please. I might be there's a switch maybe on the front that needs to be turned on. Let's see. There we go. There we go.
Hi, I'm Elizabeth, I'm from Elsevier, and I had a question, I guess from a publisher perspective for Darla. How do you see what's going on right now. Now affecting the policies that you support for your journals specifically related to a gold versus Green. What do you think. So, I do agree with Clark and Esposito in the brief and that I don't think that we're going to see a lot of publishers backing off the approach that has been taken, which is if you want to deposit immediately the final version of record, you pay a fee.
And that was I think it's been a position that's been a firm line that I don't see changing. I mean, prove me wrong, but I don't see that changing. I would say policy wise, the kinds of things we've been thinking of and looking at on the front end are waivers. If we have someone coming to us, typically we allocate our waivers for DEI purposes. We will say we want to support researchers in third world countries, along with most of the other major publishers who participate in research for life and issues like that, but also early career researchers who may not yet have funding.
Well, we've added to that, and we've actually put in to our practice if someone comes to you and asks because their research funding was cut in the US, it's time that we think about that too, as a potential waiver potential need. So on that front, I think that's pretty consistent. I think this is going to have bigger impacts on what we do for research integrity. And because the gold standard science EO is just out.
I don't have all the answers now, but I would see our research integrity policies being impacted and us really needing to be in almost a proactive PR position on what we do on that front. So that the editor Martin, letters are already dealt with before they arrive. I think that would be my recommendation. Yes, please.
Hi, I'm Stephanie Finnegan. I work for AIP publishing, and I've been sitting in this chair trying to formulate my question because the idea that we're facing this sort of shock and awe approach I'm going to run through with the executive orders and change everything. And then the long term idea that the courts will likely turn back much of the executive mandates.
But there's real damage in the middle. So when I lose my job, even if I get my job back six months later, maybe I don't have a house anymore or I lose my grant. Maybe I'll get an opportunity to have a new grant. But my career has been derailed. So the long term effects, of these actions now, even if they will be overturned, are going to have a dampening effect on what we do.
I think my question is, I mean, what then must we do what is just in the thoughts and opinions of the panel. What does the next 10 years, 15 years look like for science as a result of what will be left behind. I'm going to try to answer this very. I'm sorry.
The short answer is there's going to be two elections, right. Coming up very shortly. We're going to have a midterm next year. And then we're going to have a presidential election in three years. Quite frankly, those will be extremely consequential for this industry because of the changes that have been proposed during this term.
The next administration needs to make the determination. Is it going to continue down this track and with this change, or is it going to swing the pendulum back and try to whip lash this back into a system that we may be more familiar with from a few years ago. I don't have a good answer to that question. That's going to be up to a very fickle electorate. I've been doing politics for a very, very long time. The last thing you're going to ever catch me do is predict how a campaign ends up.
But we're going to have several of them, and those will be quite consequential. This issue will be part of the next presidential campaign, not just when it comes to science, but when it comes to staffing, what size the federal government should be, what shape it takes. Is it involved in research and development at a massive scale, or is it more of a limited, targeted thing. Those are all going to be questions that help drive this cycle.
And I would just echo and maybe put a finer point on what I was saying before about how I think that we will be facing a pretty long term effect and a chilling effect on folks who are trying to enter research careers. I think that domestically, you have us students who are in high school right now who are looking at what is going on, and maybe that is influencing their college choices.
Maybe that's influencing their extracurricular choices and just how they envision themselves in the future. I don't think that will be negligible at all. And of course, it will accelerate depending on how the next few years go. Or it could also be stalled. I think that in terms of what that means for the US ecosystem in general, I think that we are already seeing some indicators that people who are researching in the US currently are looking elsewhere.
And I'm just pulling up some data. There was an April analysis from nature that the nature careers global science job platform shows that US scientists submitted 32% more applications for jobs abroad between January and March 2025 than during the same period in 2024. Some of that might be, the shock to the ecosystem of the last few months. But I would not be surprised if that trend continues.
I know that also there are people folks in the EU, in Canada, even in China, are actively courting US based scientists and researchers and saying, this is we see what's going on. This might be a better place for you. So I think it will depend on it will depend on so much, of course. But I think we're seeing some concerning indicators that this is not going to be a good thing for the US research ecosystem.
Thank you for making that point because I think PFAS has been tracking for years now, not just in this administration that there is a brain drain. It is a real thing. Yet you hear some of the Congressional testimony. I mean, I think it was RFK jr. who said, there's no working scientist has been let go from NIH. And then 30 seconds later, 95 people on LinkedIn said, I'm a scientist.
I'm not working there anymore. So there's an extreme disconnect of between what you've been monitoring for years and what's actually happening. Unfortunately, that is a side effect of President Trump's management style, where information can be contradictory and come from two different sources at the same time. We saw that with Director Kratsios. I believe it was actually nature magazine who was interviewing him, and they asked about subcontract awards and whether those were all going to be canceled.
Director Kratsios admonished the reporter for spreading rumor and innuendo, and how dare they suggest that OSTP would do something like that. That afternoon, OSTP canceled all the subcontracts. So it's tough. It's tough to monitor. It's tough to track. It's been the bane of my pushing six months now. But here we are.
Yeah and just one final comment there is, I think one thing that we are severely lacking right now is good information and a top down view of what the effects are. I think we're thinking about this in terms of the universities and what universities are trying to do in response to these executive orders, in response to the threats that have been levied. How that is changing their funding structures, programs and policies going forward.
I think my organization, we're putting together a survey and linking up with universities to get a better holistic sense of what is going on, because I think part of the problem right now is that there's so much chaos that it's hard to measure and have an evidence based view of the impacts this is having right now. Thank you. Yes, please. Thanks to the panel.
This is a great session. My name is Sarah. I'm at the American Institute of Physics publishing. I was wondering if we can talk a little bit about upside here. If this is chemo and it doesn't kill the patient, there's a lot that needs to be cured. And in all of our organizations, I think are struggling with this to some extent or the other. Higher Ed is incredibly calcified.
Groupthink is a real problem. Openness is not something scientists have strongly supported for a long time. If you read a journal of the American Academy of public health. Jay Bhattacharya's journal, if you read their principles around openness, PLOS could have written that center for open science could have written that. So the illnesses are actually legit in some cases.
And so if it is a case of chemo where we come out the other side, what are you guys anticipating as upside scenarios in a very terrible crisis that we can anticipate coming out of this. This is going to be controversial. I do think that the American public has an expectation of reading the results and the findings, whether or not they understand them or not. They have the expectation that if taxpayer funding has supported the research that the published article is that and that's a reality.
And we're not going to change that reality. So we could be moving. That would be one tactic that I would see. We could open access is sort of stalled. The last few years, we've sort of seen this basic flat line in a lot of our journals for a year or two now on the open access uptake. So there could be driving more towards openness and transparency.
And the second thing that I would say, because I actually do try to think of Susie sunshine moments, Sarah me, I always try to find one was if the people that are trusted and now in leadership trusted by the population that doesn't trust scientists if they understand and are somehow brought along with gold standard science as something other than policy person, but that there's real information there and real standards that are applied that we could see public trust in science.
Go back up, because it's not those of us who already believe in science who need our public. Trust in science to go up. We're good. We're there. It's actually those who. So if there's something good that would come out of this, that would be. That would be my hope.
So I'll answer this as a shameless partisan. I mentioned before we saw a lot with policy that. Particularly with health and Human Services that are not your traditional Republican conservative policies. If there's one thing this chaos does and President Trump's personality does, it allows him to. Bring issues to the forefront that your traditional two party dichotomy is ill equipped to handle.
That can be on a range of issues, but he kicks down the walls and barriers of propriety and tradition in a way that allows new conversations to happen that would otherwise take decades to happen down in DC. So if I'm looking for a silver lining to all of this, I agree. Sarah I agree with you. As a Democrat, the one thing I get on my own party for all the time is that if you listen to them right now, there isn't a single one of them admitting that the situation before Donald Trump came to power was a problem.
Donald Trump did not come out of nowhere. People have concerns. They have legitimate issues that were not being addressed by the ruling class as they like to be called down there. And that vacuum was filled by somebody who promised change. We don't all like that change. But if there's one thing Donald Trump has been doing, it's what he said he was setting out to do.
Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Hi. This is a question for Darla. Hi Darla. I'm Ricci from the AGU. I don't know what the question is. Maybe I just want to complain.
And we know each other. So you mentioned the geopolitical thing a little bit. And I've been thinking about this. And I guess the one thing is like last, maybe the last few weeks, something new has happened to us. And this is something that's kind of totally blew my mind because we've seen what we've seen, we know the research funding issues and then things like the censorship, some of the words and our organization and our industry has come up with statements and policies.
Cope has made statements about this or journals. It's like we stand for research integrity. We don't agree with all that stuff. But what I'm now seeing is the erosion of the little attacks on our process, our methods. So I'm speaking particularly for peer review. So I've heard two cases from an editor and a reviewer of ours that are based at a US federal agency who are told us that they can't.
They've been told that they can't review or handle a paper if all the authors are from China. So this is new to me. And, because I think about all of these things like, these are things that we can control and things that we can't control, things that we can fight and things that we cannot fight. And the peer review process, our editorial boards is something that we should be able to control, should be able to make policies on.
So, I don't it just kind of blew my mind. So I'm curious, have you heard about anything like this or anybody really. And what are your conversations have been like with your editorial boards, with the people who's managing the peer review process and vetting the process, with this landscape because your boards are all global, I know that. So there's a lot of opinions.
So I don't know. So I want to raise that. That's a lot. Yeah we should have therapy over Martinis. We should I guess I've been looking very carefully for any of those signs. The whole team is looking. We've got all of our members societies looking and understanding that we need to report back.
And I had the weirdest thing happen in the last week, and it was a reviewer who came back and said it was unethical for us to ask him to review this without providing him with an iPad or a mobile device or and I have never had anything in my 20 almost 25 years now. I was sort of floored that I think what it's a bit of what was said, said by Tony is that there's an open door now when these kinds of challenges start to be made or these questions about our research integrity.
Now it's an open door and everybody wants to bring their complaint to the forefront. And we need to be acting proactively on the PR front. We need to be putting out messages about what we do and where the money is reinvested. For those of us in scholarly societies, for example, we cannot be opaque about those issues. We cannot be reactive. We need to be more proactive so we can point to those things.
And so that's the tactic that I've given advice to our team in terms of when you're talking with the editors and the next time you meet with the early career researcher board. And here are the things that we want to remind them. We've told them we've made that part of our messaging and training, but now we need to bring that back to the forefront. I do think we're going to hear everything and every complaint and every unhappy moment, because once someone posts on social media that they had a problem on American Airlines flight, blah, blah, blah, 50 other people come in post.
It's human behavior. It's my community and I feel heard. So I think we want to be really thoughtful about those responses and proactive in our PR. Thank you. Thanks, Darla, and thank you to the panel. This is excellent. Thank you. And we can take one last question because we're almost at time.
So thank you. Yes my name is Allison bailon and I'm at Duke University press, and we are a publisher and a Department of a research institution that is heavily invested in health and medical research. And so I was wondering if you could address the change to indirect costs, because you know what we're finding and what libraries, who license all of our work are finding is if you're that far upstream in the research endeavor as we are something that global and gigantic is going to affect the entire institution even if you're not directly involved with researching.
I'll make one comment and then turn it over. I think what I've been hearing a lot of from reading and listening to RFK and to others in this space, is there's a feeling that there's too much red tape. And Michael Kratsios references in his interview at the academies. The 40% of time spent on red tape and eliminating that. And so I think while I don't have a crystal ball to say what's going to happen at the OMB and how is FAA going to change for institutions.
I think you can start to think along those lines like, where can we eliminate some of this unnecessary red tape, and what issues are of relevance and priority to this administration, because that's where the funding is currently being held, whether we like it or not, whether we agree with it or not, and whether we want Congress or courts to do things, that's a lot of what's actually happening. So if you can think of ways to say we streamlined B, and C, and we eliminated these pieces of red tape, that might be a proactive strategy.
Yeah, I think that this is a great question and is one of the reasons why PFAS is working to try to pull together a survey to get more information, because we've heard a lot from individual universities and departments about the possible impact that they would foresee. I don't think that we have consolidated information about what choices universities are making right now for their next year's budget and where that money is being allocated.
And I'm curious to hear your experience, but I think I don't know if I have specific advice here, but beyond what Darla already said, but I think it is a need and that we don't know the trends yet and where people are trying to find that bloat where that could be found. I know that we've heard a lot of anecdotal stories, too, about PhD PhD programs getting shrunk. And that's even some things like infrastructure cost getting changed.
But I think it's something that we need more information on. And that's what we're trying to do, folks over in the administration claim and I'm just repeating what they told me. So please take this with a second degree grain of salt. They have gone to universities and research institutions and basically asked them to show their work over the last decade, and were unimpressed with the response that they got from the universities that I think, is the motivation driving a lot of this.
They truly believe, again, this goes back to this sense of vindication, that this is excess, this is red tape, this is unnecessary spending and that the underlying research will not be negatively affected by these cuts. So I think it's incumbent upon you guys, as you're going out there as a coalition, as the research universities up, make that counterargument, explain why this funding is not superfluous, why it is not optional, how it is driving the actual research and getting the results we are being told, at least by HHS, that is the be all, end all results.
Results results. Is there any sense that in the focus on there's too much red tape. I mean, not to defend things I don't typically defend, but the University bureaucracy built up around managing grants is in response to federal compliance requirements. So are there any moves being made at the federal level to change those requirements. Not actively by Congress.
I can't speak if there's any conversations going on inside of HHS. I have not seen any legislation to fix that. That sounds like something that should be being worked on, though. If folks in Congress who want to align themselves with this move, they should be working on that. Thank you. Thank you.
We have to end the session now, but the work continues. Thank you all for sharing your hour with us to our panel.
Segment:0 .
Hi, everyone, thank you all for sharing this hour with us. We know that the conference is always jam packed with very good things, and we appreciate you sharing your time with us. My name is Tom Ciavarella. I'm head of Public Affairs for frontiers. This is the third consecutive year at SSP that you've given me the privilege of being the moderator of this panel.
Thank you for the continued interest in the three years that we've been doing this, the political climate has gotten weirder and weirder. So there's a lot to cover. And so with that, I'm going to keep my introductory remarks very short. I will just say for level setting. And as a reminder, we're all going to be abiding by the SSP code of conduct during this meeting.
We would love to hear your questions. I'm going to open up as I'm doing now. We're going to have the panel introduce themselves and then speak a little bit. I might have a follow up question or two, but we want you to ask your questions. We want to make sure there's enough time for that. When you do ask your questions, please identify who you are, who you're with.
I will ask the panelists as well, just to repeat a little bit, to just so everybody understands the context of the question. Thank you again, all of you, for being here without actually, before we get started, round of applause for our panel for sharing their time. Tony, can we start with you. Would you mind just letting everybody know a little bit about who you are and what you do, and maybe giving us some Washington, DC level setting.
So where do we find ourselves. As of half an hour ago, let's say, as Tom has been, this is a very. As Tom has been alluding to this is a very transitory time for federal policymaking down the road in Washington, DC. Just by way of background, my name is Tony Hobbs. I'm a lobbyist down in DC with a firm called platinum advisors. We had the pleasure of actually representing the frontiers team for a little while down there.
That's how we were connected with Tom and those guys. We are not a science or publishing focused firm. We're a multi-client firm. However, we do have quite a few folks in our shop who are specialists in this area. I am not one of them. I am much more of a generalist on this kind of thing. So I'm going to keep everything pretty high topic and then let everybody else dig in to some of the more gritty details on this stuff.
As Tom mentioned, I'm here to set the stage on what's been going on in Washington. My normal presentation for this is about an hour and a half long of just me spinning off what's been going on for the last 95 days. Obviously not going to do that with you guys. I figured it'd be a lot better just to give you an inside sense of where the motivation behind a lot of these actions are coming.
I think most people are probably pretty caught up on what actions are happening. Washington Post, New York times the Hill, rags. They're all doing a very good job of keeping up with these changes as they happen. You'll notice there's not a lot of predicting going on in Washington, DC as a lobbyist. My least favorite words are I don't know when I'm asked what's going to happen.
It's when I've been saying and my colleagues have been saying more and more and more. The ultimate cause for all of that is a consolidation in decision making, and that is a theme that is permeating throughout the Trump presidency, particularly in his second term. If there's one thing that I have seen between his first term and his second term, is that President Trump has truly learned from the roadblocks and the obstacles that he hit when he was trying to make drastic changes on the first time, and he is changing his tactics and his strategies in order to affect more change in the rapid fashion that he is just naturally accustomed to.
There is that kind of Trump whiplash effect. He moves incredibly quickly. He can be a bit brash. That is his personality. That is genuinely who Donald j. Trump is. That is not an act. That is not some kind of facade that he puts on. He does use it as a bargaining chip, but it's not something that he's putting on superficially.
So when he gets belligerent, when he gets a little flustered, when he gets a little blustery, that is him. He's not really calculating these actions or activities. So the expression that I like to use a lot is do not take Donald Trump literally, but do take him seriously. When he says things like, I'm going to kick every foreign student out of Harvard, the folks in this room are well aware of the rules and how this works, and that he probably cannot legally do that.
And in fact, we know he can't legally do that through executive Fiat. Is Donald Trump serious about wanting to put the screws on Harvard and really affect how they do their admissions process. 100% and he is going to find avenues in order to extract concessions from places like Harvard when he feels they have lost alignment with his priorities. So since he's learned from the let me back up, the lessons he learned came about mostly from two major battles he had.
The first was, as this group will be very familiar with was during COVID. His battle with what he considered the experts Doctor Fauci, the other folks within the NIH and within the federal bureaucracy who he went kind of on a political battle with on a day to day basis. I'm here to tell all of you that if you believe that Donald Trump has been chastised by that process or has changed his thinking, I'm sorry.
He feels fully and 100% vindicated in his actions during COVID. He truly believes he did the right thing, and that it was other folks who caused any downstream consequence, whether that's shutting down schools, mask mandates, things like that. The other fight that he had during his first term was what against he referred to as the deep state. This was your national security apparatus, your ingrained bureaucrats who were fighting against his initial agenda.
I bring those two up because to me, when we look at the actions and activities he's taking now in this second term, they all come back to in his mind, righting the wrongs that occurred during that first term. So he's going after the experts and he's going after the deep state. And what that looks like in the news cycle is he's going after academia and he's going after the bureaucracy, bureaucratic workers in Washington, DC, and he has two major mechanisms by which to do that.
He can do that through funding, and he can do that through personnel. When it comes to the agencies, very black and white, pretty straightforward. He has tried, with middling success to cut grants programs direct spend from agencies to programs that he does not like. And when it comes to personnel, he had his soft firing or what do you want to call it, the voluntary leave.
He has tried to force some folks out again with middling success, based off of which court seems to get there first. But his overarching goal is to consolidate that decision making within the bureaucracy and bring a lot of that day to day activity into the Executive Office of the presidency. Now, when it comes to battling his experts or the experts, his other nemesis, we're seeing that a lot in academia.
Harvard, of course, is the poster child for that kind of fight, I believe just today, again, another court has said he can't block students from applying to Harvard. What we're going to end up seeing now that he has had his flurry of activity, is the courts actually have an opportunity to catch up to a lot of these actions that he's taken, and quite frankly, he's going to lose on the merits on a lot of these.
Now there's going to be an appeal process. So I think we're going to be looking for most of the summer at various decisions that the president made in his first month or two, going back and forth between appellate and district courts as they get kicked back and forth. And many of these will work their way up through into the Supreme Court. I'm not going to pretend or try to guess as to how this Supreme Court will act.
I will just say, if there is concern that this is a rubber stamp Supreme Court for the Trump administration, I think I can assuage that fear quite a bit. These are hardcore conservatives on that bench, for sure, but they are not Trump acolytes or there to do his bidding. They are absolutely going to align in a lot of places and change drastically, particularly how environmental and energy policy is regulated at the federal level, but this court is not interested in drastically changing how jurisprudence at least works here in the country.
That brings us all the way up to just activities that have happened, particularly with health and Human Services Secretary RFK jr. He's a weird one. Well, no no, no. Beyond beyond the obviousness of that statement. He is he's an interesting pick. Let me put it that way. He is not a traditional conservative when it comes to health care.
He's not, if you listen to him, his senior advisor, a gentleman by the name of Carlie, means he has his sister. Doctor Casey Means who I believe is up for the surgeon general posting. These are very influential folks in President Trump's orbit when it comes to health care, when it comes to food and nutrition. If you listen to any one of them speak in a vacuum about food and nutrition, you would swear they came out of my New England progressive House Office up on Capitol Hill.
It is. We need to move away from treatment based and look towards preventative medicine. We need to focus on food as an aspect of health care. Pretty progressive policies, frankly. What he has been able to do is go up to President Trump, who is your quintessential dealmaker and doesn't really have a strong stance on anything, and convince President Trump that this was the popular and the populist stance to take on food and health.
President Trump is concerned primarily with popularity and winning his elections and maintaining his mandate to govern. So when RFK jr. came to him and said, look, I have a way to bring a new coalition of voters who really care about these issues into your camp. President Trump has embraced them wholeheartedly. So this is a very interesting coalition over at HHS. It is not a right wing coalition whatsoever.
What it is, however, is uniquely targeting the pharmaceutical industry as the Public Enemy number one of health writ large. Again, as a progressive, I usually hop up and down and say, that's awesome, that's awesome. Like, we're finally going after the pharmaceutical companies. However, the methods and the techniques that they're going to use to do this are not something you see out of any kind of Democratic administration.
They will very much be the Trumpian way of doing things, which is direct mandate where possible, and then many fewer carrots than sticks when it comes to reacting to folks who do or do not respond. So that's a general overview of how this administration and HHS is looking at these things. I think we'll get more into as we go on into President Kennedy or sorry, there's a Freudian slip for you into Secretary Kennedy's recent statements on publishing.
We also have a recent executive order from the White House on gold science that we'll get into the nitty gritty, but I do these activities, too, are all coming from this sense that President Trump really does feel like he has a bone to pick with academia and the expert class that sets scientific policy, and he is going to utilize his bully pulpit and the awesome power of the federal government to bring them to heel.
Tony, thank you very much. And this group here is being seen as a part of that expert class. We've always thought of ourselves as doing good work, and we do good work. And we wondered sometimes who paid attention to it. Well, now it's getting attention, not the attention that we would have hoped for in other administrations. But I wonder if you could talk to you a little bit about that.
So given that foundation that we've just heard from Tony, this is where we find ourselves over the past five months. How is that specifically playing out day to day for publishers. So when I was on that cheerful note. I will dig into the way that I've been categorizing these issues because as when I checked a month ago, there were more than 130 executive orders, and they're constant.
So how do you start to think about this as a publisher and the impact that it might have on you. And I have what I call the four winds of change that are blowing and those winds of change I've grouped as research funding in the US establishment people and norms, the issues around language and particularly things like trust in science and geopolitics. And so those are my four major categories. Not to leave anything out because I have thought of how different issues fit in those categories.
And in the US, the research funding has been shifting already, and it's been shifting away from federal funding to more investment in private by private industry. And so when you look at federal funding, that's been pretty flat for us. So that's a known situation that we've been dealing with. The new changes here are the drastic cuts, the potential shifting priorities which could be leading to more interest in issues like national security and phrases like American AI dominance, as opposed to where the patterns were moving previously.
And so, what I see on that research funding side is the massive cuts are really the biggest issue that we're constantly facing, and they're likely to impact everything we do. They're also likely to impact compliance checks. So when we start to talk about open science and those issues where who's going to check that compliance if 50% of the staff is gone. And that is not only us as in publishers, but it's the entire research ecosystem, including universities and those kinds of issues.
And the Congressional Research services had a may 2025 report on University expenses and an expectation that would be changing. So that was one. Research funding. Two is establishment people norms all being upended and all at the same time that you're looking at, well, this can be replaced by tech or AI. So if you think about the major changes at the agencies, it's not just the leadership of those agencies, which often changes when you have a new president, but it's actually a lot of times the entire senior leadership of agencies that have changed.
And those large cuts in staffing are possibly going to lead to brain drain. And we know all of the countries around the world that are already raising their hand in Hong Kong and the EU and France, a safe place for science, all of these initiatives. But really you can even see the changing norms in the fact that there's a feeling that academic freedom is being attacked.
At the same time, academic freedom is being defended at certain agencies as the standard we need to rise towards. So the traditional way that grants were awarded, if you think about peer review, the peer review panels, that has also been changing. There's been exploration with prizes, with portfolio contributions that were going out from DARPA. People focused kind of recognition as opposed to research grants and peer review.
So we're in this world where basically the establishment and the norms are all upended, and that includes the people that we've always worked with and partnered with as publishers on the trust in science issue and so die we know has taken a massive hit. And I think that's all being done together collectively that the DEI policies have taken a hit and words are being put forward such as gold standard science and transparency and openness and replication, things that quite frankly, we agree with for the most part in publishing.
However, it's the implementation that matters, and it's all centered around fostering the American public trust in science that is the core, the moral high ground that is being argued from this. And it's largely following on COVID. As Tony said, if you look at the players and who they are. There was a lot of discontent during COVID, and there were scientists who felt shunned, and policy health experts who felt that their views were not being heard.
And that's coming to the forefront. So we're living in this reality of playing all of that out. The OSTP memo held, as we've seen with NIH accelerating that to July 1. But how any of that happens within this framework of massive cuts is a question. And then my fourth and this is the one that I think we often just sort of downplay because we feel we have no control over it is geopolitics and the regional dynamics.
The US and China collectively are 43% of the global GDP. And anyone who is sitting here and thinking, it's not going to affect my journal because it doesn't publish a lot of US or China authors, or I can substitute B, and C is missing the entire potential of this relationship and the importance of that relationship to us. 43% of the global GDP being impacted is going to impact all of us and everything we publish, be it a book, a standard, a database, a journal, whatever.
So I think that's an area that we really need to focus on more. And I'll pause there. Absolutely thank you very much. Again, there were just headlines this morning about students from China. And, how the State Department is going to start to look into them. And we have been concerned about who is going to be available to be on campus or to just be in the country.
And it is wise that the four pillars that you're looking at, that's one of them. I want to circle back to trust in science, though, because we in this room think of trust in Science a very specific way. And we don't just say it. We do live it through the peer review process, through the way that we publish, through the transparency. We really do believe in trust in science.
Karen, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, because you deal specifically with disinformation and misinformation, and I would love to hear you. You brush up against our world. The Federation of American Scientists definitely fits in with this World, which is why we're so thankful to have you here today. But you also have a lot of other concerns as well that we'd love to hear about.
Yeah, I'm so glad to be here today. And I'm Corinna from the Federation of American Scientists. And I think that we have two perspectives here, because at the Federation of American Scientists, I work on our AI policy team. So we spend a lot of time thinking about AI and emerging tech policy and where that's going in Washington, DC but then we also spend time thinking about the broader science and tech ecosystem in the United States and try to envision where we're going.
And I think that the main thesis that I would bring here today is that we are in a broad crisis of public trust in science and scientific system in the US. I would also link this back to COVID, and it's interesting because I pulled some numbers showing that Pew Research that I think we're at 10 points lower in the measurements of public trust in science and scientists than we were in 2019. It actually started to go up a little bit in 2024, but overall, we're still in a much worse off place than we were before COVID, and I think that there is historical precedent to that.
Oftentimes during pandemics, no matter how they go or how they are handled, there is a mass loneliness and isolation that comes from going through that period that I know that all of us remember well. And of course, some level of what happened in the scientific community there as well, probably didn't help things too. So I think that's one place that we're starting from. And then I think that what we are seeing from the Trump administration is a certain faction of that camp that is now empowered to carry out a level of grievances that have developed over the past few years, both during COVID and before COVID.
I think that one thing we are trying to look at to the future is what these funding cuts and this the demolishment of grant funding and also the threats that are being levied against universities and international talent too, is what that's going to do to the research ecosystem in general. We don't think that those things are good. Likely going to see a major chilling effect. Even just the threat, even if these things are not carried out.
We anticipate a significant drop in international talent, both new talent coming in as students, even if they continue to be permitted to. But then also the huge population of folks who are working in science and tech in the United States who are not born in this country. Those are essential folks that may not see this as a place where they can continue doing their research and thriving. Even if they are not technically booted out.
And we think that is a major problem that we are facing. And one that won't help us in the mission of building back that public trust that has been hurt. We also think domestically this is going to hurt domestic talent pipelines, as new researchers are finding their careers cut off before they may have even begun, or find projects broken before they have a chance to grow. I think that another important thing that I want to bring up here, given my background in AI policy, is that all of this is happening not just in an unstable political environment, but also at a time of major technological expansion of artificial intelligence.
And of course, there are a range of views of how transformative this technology is going to be, many of which are valid. And honestly, nobody has a crystal ball of where this technology is going to go. But we have seen marked increases in the capabilities of these general purpose models that have accelerated over the past several years. And so it is likely that those capabilities will continue to grow to some extent.
And I think it is also notable that many folks in power, both in the Trump administration and outside. See this as a national priority and are increasingly securitising this issue. You're hearing calls for a Manhattan Project to develop artificial general intelligence a disputed term, but that it's likely that we will be seeing more resources put towards US technological development in this realm, possibly through things like public private partnerships.
We saw the Stargate announcement where Trump struck a deal with OpenAI and other folks to I think, Channel $5,500 in towards the development of AI, all private money, but with a public hand in it. So I think we will see more things along those lines. And just for this AI conversation in general, I think it's really relevant to the public trust angle. I'm sure we have all had experiences either working with AI ourselves, seeing outputs from other people.
And we know that there are significant problems with hallucinations in these technologies, even as they've gained more capabilities often in the quantitative realm. Newer models from OpenAI from DeepSeek are reasoners, as they're often called, and are very good at some of these quantitative tasks, like coding. I think OpenAI is O3 is reaching the 175th best competitive coder on the planet.
So they're very good at some tasks, less good at general purpose tasks. And as they've advanced, they're also much worse at hallucinating, honestly. So we are seeing this technology where it's very easy to produce vast amounts of information that looks like it could be right. And it may not be. And you need a close and discerning eye in order to tell what is true and what is not true.
The problem is we do not have those structures in place yet. We do not have federal legislation in place for AI regulation. There are many proposals that are on the table, but it is unclear where that is going in the Trump world. And I'm sure we can talk more about that later. But yeah, I think that's what I would say is that in this new realm of the artificial intelligence gaining capabilities and more often diffusing through the ecosystem and more folks using it for their research, for their writing, it is very important for people in the publishing community to be thinking about establishing the right frameworks and responsible governance techniques in order to ensure that research integrity is not harmed throughout that, and to keep that lens of public trust should not be threatened by the expansion of this technology further.
So thank you very much. I think we're going to have a lot of questions from the audience about the specifics of that in terms of the licensing, in terms of the tariffs. But, Tony, I'm wondering if you could speak to the legislative part of it. Yeah so on the. I particularly thank you for reminding me. So the reconciliation package that the house had just recently passed actually has within it a 10 year moratorium on any state AI law.
So, just this administration is unafraid of new technology in a way that we have not seen and wants to utilize unproven technology in a way that we have not seen. It's with artificial intelligence, with Bitcoin stablecoins. It really is. I would call this a bit of a Musk effect. He has pretty high minded, engineering minded folks around him helping him on this decision making, but it doesn't really fit the Donald Trump personality for him to be so invested in AI and so invested in cryptocurrency.
But here we are. It's just very interesting that the house is going to acquiesce to him on this and most likely give him a blank slate to work on AI policy. Yeah, and I'll just jump in and say that there has been a bit of a shift in the Trump administration's policies on AI from his first administration to now. I do think part of that is maybe the Musk effect.
But in his first administration, he passed two executive orders, I believe, on artificial intelligence and actually laid some of the groundwork for early standards and R&D development. That was then carried forward by NIST and NSF. So there was some early work done by his administration that was not in this progress at all costs mindset. In fact, some of the language that was incorporated into those early executive orders included things like words like safety, words like responsible frameworks and the kind of framework I think even equity, I think equity and civil rights were mentioned in a way that is very hard to imagine.
Now you'll see they also approach AI with this public trust framework, and any comments that they have made around regulation have been, we need to make sure the public trusts this technology, that it works. So there are some roots there. But I will say there's been a pretty significant shift from the first Trump administration to the second in terms of the way that they are approaching AI.
And it's very much more, yeah, progress at all costs these days. Yeah I just wanted to make one comment. I mean, I guess the good side of this is that on the copyright front in court, the first court decision of Thomson Reuters basically went in favor of Thomson Reuters against OpenAI and Microsoft. I'm sorry, Thomson Reuters for the Westlaw product against Ross analytics and the New York Times and the copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.
So those two things went in favor. But as Tony pointed out, there are other things that can happen. And so the Library of Congress staffing firing was believed to be tied into some of those copyright stances that were being taken. And so he's leveraging that personnel firing ability in that case. Thank you very much.
I would like to ask one follow up. And then I would like everyone, if you have some questions to start thinking about it. We do have a mic in the middle of the room. Do not hesitate to queue up. I wanted to ask about the executive order that was dropped just before Memorial Day weekend on gold standard science. It had a lot of data in it about reproducibility, about what this administration's definition of science is, and might not always jive with what we think of as science or research in this room, but would love thoughts from any of you on just having read through that.
It is still early days. We're all everyone in this room is still adapting to what it means, but your thoughts on it would be much appreciated. Yeah, I'll do a quick start. So I read it on Friday afternoon. I put it aside and read it again last night. Also watched the video interview that RFK did on the impossible human podcast, where he referenced the potential for no longer publishing in major medical journals like New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet and Jama, which we all know are quality, quality outlets.
And that the government might start their own journal. And then the third thing that I would suggest that you look at is the interview with Michael Kratsios of OSTP that Marsha McNutt did, where he speaks to gold standard science. I mean, the words are really great, and I think you will find yourself, as I did, a bit torn about that piece of it until you go back and read the executive order and look at some of the exceptions.
And we were I think that was in section 7. We were trying to remember which section it was in some of the exceptions to standards which we know gold standards. You don't get exceptions that get to be made by political appointees. So I think it's the implementation of this. It is something that they're building on and taking a bit of a moral high ground and that it's absolutely tied into COVID.
But I do encourage that you read that executive order. I think it's worth everybody in this room read. And I find it very interesting. This is an executive order written in the language of open access. Clearly, somebody with a good grasp of this issue was sitting down in that room when they were working on this document with the president. It goes back to he has a very different health in NIH crew in that executive office of the presidency than he did in the first term.
They are aware of these terms. They know how to use this language. I share, I think the general consternation, as I think I've made it pretty obvious I'm a Democrat here. I read that executive order and the tingle went up in the back of my spine. No good comes from an executive order that is worded that vaguely. That was done with something in mind.
I don't think anybody really has a firm grasp on what he was looking forward at when he had that crafted out. I have an uneasy hunch we're going to find out quite soon. Yeah, I think the only thing I'll add here is that when the executive order came out, I was like, this sounds so familiar. And it is because Kratsios had also given a speech at the National academies a few weeks before the order dropped, where it was also centered around the gold standard for science.
So they've been floating this for a while. But I think that the interesting parts of that speech to me that stood out is that the he's talking about how we need creative mechanisms for science funding in the US. We need to be more creative because in his thesis he's putting forward is that scientific progress has stalled. We are bleeding money, we are spending too much and we are spending it on the wrong things.
And that some of the hints he gives about what the alternative the administration is more interested in is one public private partnerships. Also creative uses of money through things like prizes and challenges. And then also accelerated grant programs and faster funding mechanisms that my mind goes to things like eager grants and things like that. But I'm not sure if that's what he had in mind.
But I think it's interesting looking at those specific examples of alternatives. And is what I always do is in these speeches and these executive orders is like, yeah, what are they pointing to that indicates what they might be moving towards. Does anyone have a question that they would like to pose. You can think.
You can think on it if you like. I certainly have a bunch. I wanted to talk a little bit if we could, about tariffs, not just because it's constantly in the news, but because we are at a different industry meeting, the STM meeting in April, when there was the big announcement about the tariffs and there was a concern a number of publishers in this room are multinational. Things are being shipped all over the world.
There was concern about what that was going to do for the physical products. And then there were some of us who were like, well, we don't do anything in print. We don't need to worry about this, do we. And then the president made a strange comment about movies and tariffs on movies, and that got us thinking about, oh, what does he really mean. I wonder if you could speak a little bit to that, Tony.
Yeah, absolutely. I actually had that in my notes, so I'm you brought that up. Trump wants IP included in tariffs. End of story. He thinks that intellectual property is a good that is traded and has monetary value. And as such, it should be taxed as other goods are. It's obviously much more complicated to do it than I just kind of laid it out there.
But that is his underlying philosophy on intellectual property. We saw it very clearly, as Tom said, with the Motion Picture Association when he was going after Canada. He found out there's a Canadian film credit for Hollywood to go up there and do some filming, and it drove him nuts. He wanted it killed instantly. And he was ready to go into a trade war, using that as one of his main lines of fire.
So intellectual property should not, I think, be excluded during these tariff talks, just as a level set. I'm sure everybody saw a couple of courts over the last 24 hours have actually tossed the vast majority of President Trump's tariffs. President Trump was using what was known as the International Emergency Economic act. I got that wrong. Ieepa is an act in Congress that gives the president authority to do short term tariffs in a national emergency.
Trump interpreted that to state that we are living in a constant state of national emergency and that he was able to utilize tariffs basically at will. We have a special court system in the United States called the United States Court of international trade. It is basically our judicial body designed to handle international trade disputes that don't make it to the WTO. With us not really being a part of that.
They're kind of covering all of our trade law at the moment. That 3 judge panel just recently stated that the president does not have the authority to use IEEPA to do blanket tariffs. So the tariffs that were immediately hit by that were reciprocal tariffs, the 10% across the board tariffs. And the Canada and Mexico fentanyl border control tariffs. All of those tariffs were being done under that IEEPA. So we are back to a state of uncertainty and flux influx as State Department and customs updates the Harmonized Tariff Schedule to redo all several hundred thousand items that are on there for New tariffs.
I don't as a lobbyist, I never say this, but I've been saying it over and over. If you import things, get a trade lawyer. They are worth their weight in gold. It is incredibly difficult to keep up with the changes. CBP trips over itself every now and then. Now, when it comes with trying to figure out exactly what that percentage ad valorem is on these tariffs. So please do talk to some counsel.
That would be my only solid advice there. That makes sense. Darla, I wonder if I could ask you to speak to the publisher. Thought on this. If now IP is going to be tariffed publishers of all sizes, what do they have to think about. Or what do they have to plan for. Knowing what Tony just said, it is all up in the air, but what do you have to think about aside from getting counsel in this moment if it's really going to be IP is tariffed.
I love how you threw that at me, and the only thing I would say is I need two Martinis before I can answer that. I don't know that I have a lot to add here other than council on the tariff issue. I think it is. It is obviously something that we have not had to face. It's not been an issue. And yet here it is. And I think again, it's that upending the entire norm approach that's being taken is nothing.
Nothing is nothing is an institutionalized process for us. I can speak a little bit, however, to the OSTP memo. I mentioned that briefly. And just a note. One of the things I've heard over and over again at these publisher meetings is, oh, well, it's only going to apply to grants moving forward. And I just want to remind everybody that the NIH policy goes into effect July 1, and it is retroactive.
It's going to apply to publications moving forward. But remember, research grants are written many years beforehand. And so we have a lot up in the air about that we need to be considering and weighing. And those of you who are thinking about depositing to PubMed central and does your agreement cover it, really need to get on the ball with that.
So that would be a practical piece of advice that is not answering the tariff question. Thank you. Yes, please. I might be there's a switch maybe on the front that needs to be turned on. Let's see. There we go. There we go.
Hi, I'm Elizabeth, I'm from Elsevier, and I had a question, I guess from a publisher perspective for Darla. How do you see what's going on right now. Now affecting the policies that you support for your journals specifically related to a gold versus Green. What do you think. So, I do agree with Clark and Esposito in the brief and that I don't think that we're going to see a lot of publishers backing off the approach that has been taken, which is if you want to deposit immediately the final version of record, you pay a fee.
And that was I think it's been a position that's been a firm line that I don't see changing. I mean, prove me wrong, but I don't see that changing. I would say policy wise, the kinds of things we've been thinking of and looking at on the front end are waivers. If we have someone coming to us, typically we allocate our waivers for DEI purposes. We will say we want to support researchers in third world countries, along with most of the other major publishers who participate in research for life and issues like that, but also early career researchers who may not yet have funding.
Well, we've added to that, and we've actually put in to our practice if someone comes to you and asks because their research funding was cut in the US, it's time that we think about that too, as a potential waiver potential need. So on that front, I think that's pretty consistent. I think this is going to have bigger impacts on what we do for research integrity. And because the gold standard science EO is just out.
I don't have all the answers now, but I would see our research integrity policies being impacted and us really needing to be in almost a proactive PR position on what we do on that front. So that the editor Martin, letters are already dealt with before they arrive. I think that would be my recommendation. Yes, please.
Hi, I'm Stephanie Finnegan. I work for AIP publishing, and I've been sitting in this chair trying to formulate my question because the idea that we're facing this sort of shock and awe approach I'm going to run through with the executive orders and change everything. And then the long term idea that the courts will likely turn back much of the executive mandates.
But there's real damage in the middle. So when I lose my job, even if I get my job back six months later, maybe I don't have a house anymore or I lose my grant. Maybe I'll get an opportunity to have a new grant. But my career has been derailed. So the long term effects, of these actions now, even if they will be overturned, are going to have a dampening effect on what we do.
I think my question is, I mean, what then must we do what is just in the thoughts and opinions of the panel. What does the next 10 years, 15 years look like for science as a result of what will be left behind. I'm going to try to answer this very. I'm sorry.
The short answer is there's going to be two elections, right. Coming up very shortly. We're going to have a midterm next year. And then we're going to have a presidential election in three years. Quite frankly, those will be extremely consequential for this industry because of the changes that have been proposed during this term.
The next administration needs to make the determination. Is it going to continue down this track and with this change, or is it going to swing the pendulum back and try to whip lash this back into a system that we may be more familiar with from a few years ago. I don't have a good answer to that question. That's going to be up to a very fickle electorate. I've been doing politics for a very, very long time. The last thing you're going to ever catch me do is predict how a campaign ends up.
But we're going to have several of them, and those will be quite consequential. This issue will be part of the next presidential campaign, not just when it comes to science, but when it comes to staffing, what size the federal government should be, what shape it takes. Is it involved in research and development at a massive scale, or is it more of a limited, targeted thing. Those are all going to be questions that help drive this cycle.
And I would just echo and maybe put a finer point on what I was saying before about how I think that we will be facing a pretty long term effect and a chilling effect on folks who are trying to enter research careers. I think that domestically, you have us students who are in high school right now who are looking at what is going on, and maybe that is influencing their college choices.
Maybe that's influencing their extracurricular choices and just how they envision themselves in the future. I don't think that will be negligible at all. And of course, it will accelerate depending on how the next few years go. Or it could also be stalled. I think that in terms of what that means for the US ecosystem in general, I think that we are already seeing some indicators that people who are researching in the US currently are looking elsewhere.
And I'm just pulling up some data. There was an April analysis from nature that the nature careers global science job platform shows that US scientists submitted 32% more applications for jobs abroad between January and March 2025 than during the same period in 2024. Some of that might be, the shock to the ecosystem of the last few months. But I would not be surprised if that trend continues.
I know that also there are people folks in the EU, in Canada, even in China, are actively courting US based scientists and researchers and saying, this is we see what's going on. This might be a better place for you. So I think it will depend on it will depend on so much, of course. But I think we're seeing some concerning indicators that this is not going to be a good thing for the US research ecosystem.
Thank you for making that point because I think PFAS has been tracking for years now, not just in this administration that there is a brain drain. It is a real thing. Yet you hear some of the Congressional testimony. I mean, I think it was RFK jr. who said, there's no working scientist has been let go from NIH. And then 30 seconds later, 95 people on LinkedIn said, I'm a scientist.
I'm not working there anymore. So there's an extreme disconnect of between what you've been monitoring for years and what's actually happening. Unfortunately, that is a side effect of President Trump's management style, where information can be contradictory and come from two different sources at the same time. We saw that with Director Kratsios. I believe it was actually nature magazine who was interviewing him, and they asked about subcontract awards and whether those were all going to be canceled.
Director Kratsios admonished the reporter for spreading rumor and innuendo, and how dare they suggest that OSTP would do something like that. That afternoon, OSTP canceled all the subcontracts. So it's tough. It's tough to monitor. It's tough to track. It's been the bane of my pushing six months now. But here we are.
Yeah and just one final comment there is, I think one thing that we are severely lacking right now is good information and a top down view of what the effects are. I think we're thinking about this in terms of the universities and what universities are trying to do in response to these executive orders, in response to the threats that have been levied. How that is changing their funding structures, programs and policies going forward.
I think my organization, we're putting together a survey and linking up with universities to get a better holistic sense of what is going on, because I think part of the problem right now is that there's so much chaos that it's hard to measure and have an evidence based view of the impacts this is having right now. Thank you. Yes, please. Thanks to the panel.
This is a great session. My name is Sarah. I'm at the American Institute of Physics publishing. I was wondering if we can talk a little bit about upside here. If this is chemo and it doesn't kill the patient, there's a lot that needs to be cured. And in all of our organizations, I think are struggling with this to some extent or the other. Higher Ed is incredibly calcified.
Groupthink is a real problem. Openness is not something scientists have strongly supported for a long time. If you read a journal of the American Academy of public health. Jay Bhattacharya's journal, if you read their principles around openness, PLOS could have written that center for open science could have written that. So the illnesses are actually legit in some cases.
And so if it is a case of chemo where we come out the other side, what are you guys anticipating as upside scenarios in a very terrible crisis that we can anticipate coming out of this. This is going to be controversial. I do think that the American public has an expectation of reading the results and the findings, whether or not they understand them or not. They have the expectation that if taxpayer funding has supported the research that the published article is that and that's a reality.
And we're not going to change that reality. So we could be moving. That would be one tactic that I would see. We could open access is sort of stalled. The last few years, we've sort of seen this basic flat line in a lot of our journals for a year or two now on the open access uptake. So there could be driving more towards openness and transparency.
And the second thing that I would say, because I actually do try to think of Susie sunshine moments, Sarah me, I always try to find one was if the people that are trusted and now in leadership trusted by the population that doesn't trust scientists if they understand and are somehow brought along with gold standard science as something other than policy person, but that there's real information there and real standards that are applied that we could see public trust in science.
Go back up, because it's not those of us who already believe in science who need our public. Trust in science to go up. We're good. We're there. It's actually those who. So if there's something good that would come out of this, that would be. That would be my hope.
So I'll answer this as a shameless partisan. I mentioned before we saw a lot with policy that. Particularly with health and Human Services that are not your traditional Republican conservative policies. If there's one thing this chaos does and President Trump's personality does, it allows him to. Bring issues to the forefront that your traditional two party dichotomy is ill equipped to handle.
That can be on a range of issues, but he kicks down the walls and barriers of propriety and tradition in a way that allows new conversations to happen that would otherwise take decades to happen down in DC. So if I'm looking for a silver lining to all of this, I agree. Sarah I agree with you. As a Democrat, the one thing I get on my own party for all the time is that if you listen to them right now, there isn't a single one of them admitting that the situation before Donald Trump came to power was a problem.
Donald Trump did not come out of nowhere. People have concerns. They have legitimate issues that were not being addressed by the ruling class as they like to be called down there. And that vacuum was filled by somebody who promised change. We don't all like that change. But if there's one thing Donald Trump has been doing, it's what he said he was setting out to do.
Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Hi. This is a question for Darla. Hi Darla. I'm Ricci from the AGU. I don't know what the question is. Maybe I just want to complain.
And we know each other. So you mentioned the geopolitical thing a little bit. And I've been thinking about this. And I guess the one thing is like last, maybe the last few weeks, something new has happened to us. And this is something that's kind of totally blew my mind because we've seen what we've seen, we know the research funding issues and then things like the censorship, some of the words and our organization and our industry has come up with statements and policies.
Cope has made statements about this or journals. It's like we stand for research integrity. We don't agree with all that stuff. But what I'm now seeing is the erosion of the little attacks on our process, our methods. So I'm speaking particularly for peer review. So I've heard two cases from an editor and a reviewer of ours that are based at a US federal agency who are told us that they can't.
They've been told that they can't review or handle a paper if all the authors are from China. So this is new to me. And, because I think about all of these things like, these are things that we can control and things that we can't control, things that we can fight and things that we cannot fight. And the peer review process, our editorial boards is something that we should be able to control, should be able to make policies on.
So, I don't it just kind of blew my mind. So I'm curious, have you heard about anything like this or anybody really. And what are your conversations have been like with your editorial boards, with the people who's managing the peer review process and vetting the process, with this landscape because your boards are all global, I know that. So there's a lot of opinions.
So I don't know. So I want to raise that. That's a lot. Yeah we should have therapy over Martinis. We should I guess I've been looking very carefully for any of those signs. The whole team is looking. We've got all of our members societies looking and understanding that we need to report back.
And I had the weirdest thing happen in the last week, and it was a reviewer who came back and said it was unethical for us to ask him to review this without providing him with an iPad or a mobile device or and I have never had anything in my 20 almost 25 years now. I was sort of floored that I think what it's a bit of what was said, said by Tony is that there's an open door now when these kinds of challenges start to be made or these questions about our research integrity.
Now it's an open door and everybody wants to bring their complaint to the forefront. And we need to be acting proactively on the PR front. We need to be putting out messages about what we do and where the money is reinvested. For those of us in scholarly societies, for example, we cannot be opaque about those issues. We cannot be reactive. We need to be more proactive so we can point to those things.
And so that's the tactic that I've given advice to our team in terms of when you're talking with the editors and the next time you meet with the early career researcher board. And here are the things that we want to remind them. We've told them we've made that part of our messaging and training, but now we need to bring that back to the forefront. I do think we're going to hear everything and every complaint and every unhappy moment, because once someone posts on social media that they had a problem on American Airlines flight, blah, blah, blah, 50 other people come in post.
It's human behavior. It's my community and I feel heard. So I think we want to be really thoughtful about those responses and proactive in our PR. Thank you. Thanks, Darla, and thank you to the panel. This is excellent. Thank you. And we can take one last question because we're almost at time.
So thank you. Yes my name is Allison bailon and I'm at Duke University press, and we are a publisher and a Department of a research institution that is heavily invested in health and medical research. And so I was wondering if you could address the change to indirect costs, because you know what we're finding and what libraries, who license all of our work are finding is if you're that far upstream in the research endeavor as we are something that global and gigantic is going to affect the entire institution even if you're not directly involved with researching.
I'll make one comment and then turn it over. I think what I've been hearing a lot of from reading and listening to RFK and to others in this space, is there's a feeling that there's too much red tape. And Michael Kratsios references in his interview at the academies. The 40% of time spent on red tape and eliminating that. And so I think while I don't have a crystal ball to say what's going to happen at the OMB and how is FAA going to change for institutions.
I think you can start to think along those lines like, where can we eliminate some of this unnecessary red tape, and what issues are of relevance and priority to this administration, because that's where the funding is currently being held, whether we like it or not, whether we agree with it or not, and whether we want Congress or courts to do things, that's a lot of what's actually happening. So if you can think of ways to say we streamlined B, and C, and we eliminated these pieces of red tape, that might be a proactive strategy.
Yeah, I think that this is a great question and is one of the reasons why PFAS is working to try to pull together a survey to get more information, because we've heard a lot from individual universities and departments about the possible impact that they would foresee. I don't think that we have consolidated information about what choices universities are making right now for their next year's budget and where that money is being allocated.
And I'm curious to hear your experience, but I think I don't know if I have specific advice here, but beyond what Darla already said, but I think it is a need and that we don't know the trends yet and where people are trying to find that bloat where that could be found. I know that we've heard a lot of anecdotal stories, too, about PhD PhD programs getting shrunk. And that's even some things like infrastructure cost getting changed.
But I think it's something that we need more information on. And that's what we're trying to do, folks over in the administration claim and I'm just repeating what they told me. So please take this with a second degree grain of salt. They have gone to universities and research institutions and basically asked them to show their work over the last decade, and were unimpressed with the response that they got from the universities that I think, is the motivation driving a lot of this.
They truly believe, again, this goes back to this sense of vindication, that this is excess, this is red tape, this is unnecessary spending and that the underlying research will not be negatively affected by these cuts. So I think it's incumbent upon you guys, as you're going out there as a coalition, as the research universities up, make that counterargument, explain why this funding is not superfluous, why it is not optional, how it is driving the actual research and getting the results we are being told, at least by HHS, that is the be all, end all results.
Results results. Is there any sense that in the focus on there's too much red tape. I mean, not to defend things I don't typically defend, but the University bureaucracy built up around managing grants is in response to federal compliance requirements. So are there any moves being made at the federal level to change those requirements. Not actively by Congress.
I can't speak if there's any conversations going on inside of HHS. I have not seen any legislation to fix that. That sounds like something that should be being worked on, though. If folks in Congress who want to align themselves with this move, they should be working on that. Thank you. Thank you.
We have to end the session now, but the work continues. Thank you all for sharing your hour with us to our panel.
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