Rising Publication Costs Strain Researchers

In September of 2024, Daniel Weinberger, an epidemiologist at Yale School of Public Health, submitted his postdoctoral researcher’s paper to Nature Communications, since a publication in this journal would look good on the researcher’s curriculum vita. When it came time to pay for the article almost a year later, Weinberger got a shock. “It was probably double or triple anything I had seen previously,” he said.

The current cost, called an article processing charge (APC), to publish an article in Nature Communications, an open access journal, is $7,540. Weinberger, who is an editor for FEM Microbes and previous sat on the editorial board for the journal Pneumonia, admitted that the surprise of the bill was partially his fault since he hadn’t reviewed the fee ahead of time.

However, he acknowledged that this experience represents a growing trend in science publication. “Just over the last couple years, the publication fees have just exploded at some of these journals.” He added that, while his group was able to cover this unexpected cost, “if you take that fee and multiply it by the number of papers that my broader group puts out in a year, I mean, it’s really a crazy amount of money.”

When he took his experience to LinkedIn, his post about the high publication cost garnered widespread attention from researchers around the world, all echoing the complaint of the rising costs to publish in open access formats. Many of these prominent journals with high APCs are also owned by for-profit publishers, which can have profit margins of more than 30 percent.¹ “[For] the big publishers, [an] expensive APC is working from a financial point of view, but they are losing the community. It’s becoming too, I would say, profiteering,” said Joseph Arboleda-Velasquez, a geneticist at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical School.

Coinciding with these increased costs, researchers in the US are adapting to a new policy at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that mandates that all publications stemming from the institution’s funding must be published in an open access journal with no embargo period, meaning that anyone can read the paper immediately without the article sitting behind a paywall for a period of time. This policy went into effect in July of 2025; a European funding consortium implemented a similar open access policy in 2021. Also in July of 2025, the NIH opened a request for information (RFI) on a policy aimed at minimizing the amount of money that researchers can use on grants to cover publication costs. This proposal garnered more than 900 responses from researchers, science societies, and publishers alike with wide-ranging opinions on how publication costs affect science and how funders and researchers alike should move forward in publishing scientific literature.

Open Access Publishing Leads to High Costs for Researchers

Publication is a critical part of academic research, giving scientists the ability to share their findings with their peers and the wider research community. Previously, much of academic publishing was supported by subscriptions that institutions’ libraries paid for access to these journals. In these cases, researchers published their work without paying out of their pocket.

“Those models were quite helpful when [my] lab was not funded,” said Juliano Morimoto, a biologist and interdisciplinary researcher at the University of Aberdeen. Morimoto currently serves as on the editorial board for the journal Biodiversity and is an associate editor at the journals Journal of Insect Physiology, Annals of Brazilian Academy of Science, and Journal of Animal Ecology.

Since most research is publicly funded though, a push for more accessibility for readers outside of academic institutions took place in the early 2000s, eventually leading to open access models where researchers started paying APCs to publish their articles. Depending on the journal, these fees pay for many publishing services; they provide salaries to staff editors who oversee the peer review process, they cover costs for various data integrity tools, and they pay the expenses of printing and website maintenance.

Meagan Phelan, the communications director for the Science family of journals published by the nonprofit organization the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), said that these services, and by extension the costs associated with them, are important to maintaining quality in scholarly publishing.

Phelan and the spokespeople from multiple commercial publishers pointed out that staff hours and labor are also spent on several submitted manuscripts that don’t wind up being published, thus representing hidden expenses. Additionally, they indicated that they regularly review their APCs to keep their prices consistent with the market and as fair for authors as possible, given these costs.

Arboleda-Velasquez said, “I believe in open access. I think it’s great that everyone can read the content.” Indeed, most researchers support their work being accessible to more people. Additionally, open access papers receive more citations and diversity of these citations than studies published behind paywalls.²

However, some APCs, especially those in some of the most prominent scientific journals, exceed $2,000, even costing up to $12,000 for one manuscript. “In a sense, the amount of APC authors have to pay is a cost of prestige for publishing in high-impact factor journals rather than the actual cost of publishing papers by journals,” said Denis Bourguet, an evolutionary ecologist at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE).

These high costs, many researchers said, can be barriers for early career scientists and those from institutions with less resources and funding. “The idea of open access is, of course, great; everybody should get access. But if an individual researcher has to pay for it, some will not be able to afford that from their research budget,” said Robert Arlinghaus, a fisheries scientist at Humboldt University of Berlin and the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries. Arlinghaus is a founding editor for the Journal of Fisheries and is a handling editor for the journal Fish and Fisheries, for which he receives an honorarium.

Morimoto agreed that the open access models create inequities, which others have also pointed out.^3,4 He explained that while these models allow for greater visibility and reach, researchers at institutions in richer countries are more likely to be able to afford the APCs for them. “It’s a double-edged sword,” he said.

Additionally, researchers pointed out that research funding is a finite resource, often supported by taxpayer dollars, and neither they nor their funders want to see the money go to publication costs. Yet, as more funders push for open access publishing, more researchers find themselves having to make these decisions. “It’s a classical tragedy of the commons,” Arlinghaus said.

Limited Research Funding Leaves Researchers with Difficult Publishing Decisions

Martha Bhattacharya, a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona, encountered such a situation earlier in 2025. She and her coauthor submitted a paper to the American Journal of Human Genetics that would be published without a fee on the agreement that the article would be under embargo before becoming available.

However, the paper then went through several rounds of peer review that delayed the publication; when the NIH pushed up the start of its policy requiring all federally funded research to be published as open access without any embargo, Bhattacharya and her coauthor found themselves suddenly having to pay $5,000 to publish the study.

“We have done research into the tradeoffs that researchers make to pay APC fees,” said Phelan. In 2022, AAAS conducted a survey about how these costs affect scientists’ careers; they found that many researchers experienced setbacks at the expense of having to pay publication fees, including not hiring personnel or buying equipment for their labs.

In 2023, AAAS updated the policy on five of their journals, which at the time only allowed researchers to post their study to a public repository like PubMed six months after publication, to remove that embargo. Most other publishers with this open access option— called green open access—though, still require an embargo for cost-free publication. For immediate open access publishing, referred to as gold open access and the most popular model, many publishers do offer waivers or reduced APCs for researchers working in lower resource settings, and some provide a way for researchers to request financial assistance that are approved on a case-by-case basis.

For Bhattacharya and her colleague, though, this option was not available. She said that her institution was able to provide some financial support so that the fee the authors had to pay out of pocket was more manageable. “It still is very murky how authors are supposed to comply with both the NIH and the publishers if they don’t have $5,000 to $10,000 sitting around,” she said.

To alleviate some of this strain, some institutions sign agreements with publishers for their researchers. In these cases, the publication costs for gold open access are covered by the universities. While this eliminates the direct financial burden, researchers don’t think this addresses the problem. “The publication fees that are levied on our institutions mean that we have less money for research,” said Björn Schumacher, a biologist studying aging at the University of Cologne and who serves on the editorial board for the journal Aging Medicine and received an honorarium for a previous editorial board position.

Journal Prestige Traps Researchers in a Cycle of High APC Payments

Of course, prominent, for-profit journals with high APCs are not researchers’ only options. Journals published by scientific societies and nonprofits often have lower APCs, and overflow funding goes back into the scientific community. Yet, even with open access, these smaller journals reach a more limited audience, reducing the reach of a study’s findings. Researchers said that the visibility offered by more prominent journals, then, becomes worth the higher costs.

Even so, some researchers have made the decision to publish exclusively in these society-led journals and even refuse to review for outlets with high APCs. Weinberger said that he discussed being more conscientious of choosing which journals he and his group submit their work to, and he said that he wanted to focus on publishing and editing for academic society and nonprofit journals.

However, as others pointed out, for early career researchers, publishing in a prominent journal is sometimes a “make it or break it” decision for their professional advancement. This arises from what Arlinghaus called “shortcuts” that researchers often take when reviewing candidates for jobs, fellowships, or grants, using the assumption that an article published in a prominent journal signals high quality and impact.

“We as scientists should all get rid of that behavior and never judge anybody again based on just the journal name,” said Arlinghaus. “The reality is that this is very hard to get into people’s brain because it’s so deeply ingrained as a shortcut to judge quality.”

While some argued that individuals should be evaluated based on the merit of their work, all too often, researchers find that publication history makes outsized impacts on their career success. Morimoto said, “While I don’t particularly like the system as is [and] I’m not endorsing that particular system, I’m also aware that if I don’t play in this system, then the people in my team are bound to lose, and they’re worse off.” As a result, lead scientists continue to pay APCs to high-tier journals that will provide their trainees with the prestige on their curriculum vitae to take their next step.

“We really need a culture shift on a lot of different levels. It’s not just the publication fees. It’s just sort of like why are we putting so much value on these specific journals,” said Weinberger. He pointed out that other scientific disciplines, like physics, deemphasized the journal that researchers published their papers in. “It’s going to take groups of top researchers in a field to make a strong statement. So, I’d like to see some organization around that.”

Researchers Share Ideas for How to Fix Academic Publishing

Currently, there is no single solution to address these publication problems, though there are many attempts to make changes or offer alternatives. “It won’t change by itself. It won’t. So, it can only be changed by money, and you need an alternative. And this alternative needs to be built up,” Arlinghaus said, adding that any new model should put academic publishing back into the hands of scientists. Schumacher echoed this, “We as a community have to decide how we want to change the system and how to improve the system.”

He argued that current funding should shift from supporting publication to peer review, specifically for preprints, which can reduce the time it takes to disseminate findings. He proposed that, with support from funders, these could become a source for dedicated individuals to review selected manuscripts, which publishers could then decide to feature in their journals.

However, Arlinghaus and Morimoto both argued against preprints as solutions, pointing out that many of these submissions are low-quality and that there are already too many manuscripts being submitted to journals and preprints to manage.

To address the issue of peer review of preprints by making them more reliable and citable articles, Bourguet and his colleague, Thomas Guillemaud, an population geneticist also at INRAE, launched Peer Community In (PCI) in 2016. The server provides researchers with a platform to have their manuscripts reviewed by experts in a research field. Although the authors can publish this reviewed preprint in an established journal, the PCI community also launched their own journal shortly after starting PCI. As a diamond open access journal, neither authors nor readers have to pay to publish or read the journal.

Arboleda-Velasquez was focused on a different aspect of peer review and publishing costs. Since the peer review that researchers provide journals is done without payment, Arboleda-Velasquez said that this is where his problem with the current APC costs lies. “It should be more fair in the sense that if there is money being made and profit being made, that profit should be shared with the researchers, and they should get paid for work,” he said.

To address this, he launched ScienceBank, a gold open access publishing platform to reimagine the peer review and publication process, as a project under a company he cofounded. Arboleda-Velasquez said that his vision was to make academic publishing fairer by paying reviewers, decentralizing the editorial review process, and publishing studies in multiple languages. He said that the model demonstrates that publishing fees, even with reviewer payments, can be lower and still enable a viable publication process.

However, other researchers don’t see these researcher-created alternatives as long-term solutions. “I just don’t think that is disruptive enough to move the needle in that respect,” Morimoto said. He said that the best solution to interrupt the current publishing cycle is the Declaration on Research Assessments (DORA).

This agreement seeks to reduce the impact of prominent journals in career decisions by promoting evaluations based on the contribution of the work to the field as opposed to where it was published. Funders affiliated with DORA also don’t allow their grantees to publish in specific journals, typically those with high APCs. Although not ubiquitous across institutions, Morimoto said, “DORA is supposed to bring that revolution, and I think it has very strong buy-in to do that.”

Arboleda-Velasquez said that, in the meantime, researchers should start communicating that they won’t pay high APCs, especially if journals are not paying reviewers. Bhattacharya agreed that researchers should express their funding boundaries with publishers, even to the extent of accepting that they may need to take their study elsewhere. She added that participating in comment periods from funders and voicing the value of prominent journals with researchers’ universities will also be important to get the support that scientists need.

Reflecting on these many challenges and options, Weinberger said, “It’s just, I think, a matter of agreeing as a field what direction we want to go and what solutions we want to support because I think there are alternatives to what we’re doing now, and I think we just need to agree on it and really change our values about where we want to put our emphasis.”

The Pros and Cons of Paying for Publishing with Research Funding

Recently, funders like the Gates Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have also stepped up to stop the use of their money from going to publishing costs. In September 2025, the NIH released the comments for their RFI for a similar proposal to curb grant spending on APCs. Hundreds of individual researchers responded. Some supported eliminating any federal support for publishing costs. Others balked at the proposition as a whole, while other researchers said a cap would be reasonable.

“That kind of a directive would maybe put more pressure on the publishing companies to keep the costs low and that might actually be the best way that the system could change and adapt in a way that we weren’t spending taxpayer money just to publish with these high-level journals,” Bhattacharya said about the proposal. Several other comments in the published RFI also indicated a hope that a cap on funds for publication costs could lead to lower APCs.

Phelan expressed doubt about this idea, saying, “I would imagine more funders working to help defray costs than I could imagine them convincing publishers to lower costs, although it probably depends on the publisher.” She reiterated that, since the Science family of journals are published by a nonprofit organization, the situation at their journals are different; all money goes back to the society.

However, several for-profit publishers, including Springer Nature—which publishes the Nature portfolio of journals—Elsevier, and Taylor and Francis, also expressed concerns about capping publishing costs. A spokesperson for Taylor and Francis said in an email, “Researchers should be free to communicate their work in the journal that best suits their research, and proposing to cap [open access] funding threatens that freedom to publish. We continue to advocate for policies that support a vibrant, competitive, and dynamic marketplace with a broad array of publishers and options for authors.” In these publishers’ comments on the NIH’s RFI, they also warned that capping or preventing grant funds to be used for publication costs could potentially force researchers to submit to journals with lower APCs at the expense of effective quality standards.

Phelan echoed this concern. She said that, already, the community has seen how many journals that use APCs are more profit-driven and, as a result, publish lower quality studies. In a comment she submitted to the RFI on behalf of AAAS, she wrote, “Indeed, in models that charge lower APCs, quantity of articles is particularly critical for sustaining revenue. Every article is a unit of revenue with the attendant incentives.”

Journals with higher APCs, she explained, are often charging more to fund more thorough reviews of articles and their data. “[The proposed NIH cap is] trying to address the possibility that APCs could be too high, which we’ve been thinking about for a while, too; we sympathize with that,” she said. “It’s also giving us a chance to say, ‘Please be mindful [not to] take all the money from publishing. Because publishing in ways that uphold the quality of the scholarly record are much more time and resource requisite than you might know.’”

Weinberger said that, if the NIH puts some form of restrictions on funding for publishing in place, it will likely force researchers to decide how much they want to publish in journals with high APCs if publishers don’t reduce their costs. He added that the proposal makes the present moment an ideal time to address publishing and how the community evaluates it. “There’s a lot of interest in finding better solutions here, and I think it’s just a matter of needing to organize people to settle and agree on what those solutions are.”