Industry specialists testified at a US congressional hearing on the state of scientific publishing. Credit: House Science, Space, and Technology Committee From ‘paper mills’ that sell authorships on fake or low-quality research papers to the costs associated with open-access publishing, US lawmakers are paying increasing attention to widely-debated issues in scientific publishing. In a rare show of unity, members of the US House of Representatives from both sides of the political aisle agreed at a hearing that these issues deserve more attention from government — but there was less unity on what the solutions should be. The hearing, on 15 April, was run by the the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. It addressed a provision in the US government’s proposed 2027 budget that would prohibit researchers and universities from spending federal funds on “expensive subscriptions” to academic journals and “prohibitively high” publishing fees.…