Canada’s major federal research agencies recently released a revised policy, first introduced in 2015, that aims to make publicly funded research freely available to everyone.

The Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on publications covers research funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Under the revised policy, peer-reviewed articles from Tri-Agency grants awarded after January 2027 must be freely accessible upon publication.

By mandating immediate, zero-embargo access without paywalls, federal funders have scored a landmark victory for public science and open access scholarship. Public access to research drives innovation, informs policy, helps address social challenges, strengthens democracy and reduces inequality.

But while the policy is good news for open access, it contains a major financial flaw: it allows researchers to use public research funds to pay commercial publication fees without any caps.

The cost of open access

Article-processing charges are fees paid by researchers or their institutions to make articles freely accessible through a publisher’s website. These fees vary widely, and can exceed US$12,850 for articles in top journals like Nature. Without restrictions, they risk diverting millions in research funding to corporate profits.

Researchers can meet the policy’s requirements without paying these fees by depositing their work in institutional repositories or publishing in journals that don’t charge authors. Yet the revised policy places no limit on how much public funding can go towards these charges.

In March 2025, one of us cautioned that the draft version of the policy repeated two........

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