The NIH tried to make research more accessible, researchers are paying the price

Continuing a Biden-era push accelerated by the Trump administration, the NIH is making research findings available to the public and requiring NIH-funded researchers to deposit the author-accepted version of their peer-reviewed manuscript in PubMed Central (PMC) and make it available at the time of publication.

Many publishers enforce a six to 12-month embargo period before articles can be made freely available. Several major publishers require authors to pay high article processing charges (APCs) to remove the embargos. Publishing a single open-access paper in Nature can cost nearly $13,000. Major for-profit publishers are forcing NIH-funded researchers to pay these fees to comply with the agency’s open access policy.

NIH guidance states that costs charged differentially because an author-accepted manuscript is subject to its open access policy are unallowable, meaning they are not chargeable to NIH grants.

“While open access aims to shift costs away from readers, the growing prevalence of unreasonably high article processing charges has placed undue financial pressure on researchers and funders,” Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH, wrote in a statement. He said the NIH would implement a cap on allowable publication costs starting in Fiscal Year 2026, but the NIH has not finalized a cap.

The controversy also highlights a less expensive path that already exists outside the traditional journal business model, albeit without peer review. The path includes preprints and subject repositories such as bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv and Research Square. These platforms can make research findings public quickly at little or no cost to authors or readers, and NIH has already experimented with surfacing NIH-funded preprints through PubMed Central and PubMed.

Rising costs are making research unaffordable

While many nonprofit publishers removed their embargo requirements, some for-profit publishers require that authors in peer-reviewed journals sign over copyright and control of the author-accepted version of their paper to the publisher and have not changed their embargo requirements, requiring fees ranging from almost $5,000 to almost $13,000 to remove the embargo.

This includes Springer Nature, Elsevier and Wiley, which publish more than 7,500 journals combined.

“The journals I used to recommend to my trainees are now unaffordable,” Elizabeth Selvin, director of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology, and Clinical Research and professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote in a piece for STAT.

When the editor of Nature asked Selvin to peer-review an article, she replied, “Thank you for thinking of me. However, as an NIH-funded scientist subject to federal open access policies, I am increasingly concerned about the substantial fees charged to authors by Springer Nature for compliance with NIH policy. Until the publisher adopts more equitable pricing practices, I do not feel I can volunteer my time to support its journals.”

Some journals allow researchers to self-deposit the author-accepted manuscript in PMC for free, but others prohibit this. Some journals from Springer Nature, Elsevier and Wiley restrict immediate self-deposit pathways, leaving APC-based publication as the practical compliance route for many authors. AAAS, which publishes Science, and SAGE Publishing provide free “green open access” author rights for depositing the manuscript in a repository. AIP Publishing, the JAMA Network and Mary Ann Liebert all allow authors to comply with the open access policy without paying a fee.

APCs cover operating costs as journals maintain high profit margins

Empirical market analyses show that the cost for a representative scholarly article is approximately $400 and can be up to $1,000 for highly selective journals with high rejection rates. This includes the payment of full-time staff and editors and the costs associated with maintaining a digital platform. Some journals that still distribute print editions have additional costs associated with that.

Elite journals employ full-time journalists, graphic designers and editorial staff who write news, opinions, briefs and other content. Research APCs also help to cover these costs.

Subscription-based journals must build, maintain and secure digital rights management (DRM) paywalls, which have an estimated cost of up to $2,000 per article. These fees also help cover the salaries of top management executives.

Major commercial publishers like Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley also maintain high profit margins. RELX’s Scientific, Technical & Medical segment, which includes Elsevier, reported an adjusted operating margin of 38.1% in 2025, ranking it among the top corporate entities in the world, even outperforming tech giants like Google or Apple in margin percentages.