Open-access fees keep NIH-funded research from public

In June 2025, I led a study that was accepted for publication in Nature Medicine. The cost to publish this manuscript, which reported the results of a randomized clinical trial, was zero dollars. The paper underwent rigorous peer view and extensive edits and copy editing by the editorial staff. This study was the result of years of work by a large team of staff and investigators at Johns Hopkins and was funded by a combination of philanthropy and grants from the National Institutes of Health (your and my tax dollars).

In 2026, I was part of a group that published in Nature Medicine a different NIH-funded study — also the results of years of hard work supported by your and my tax dollars. To comply with the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy that went into effect on July 1, 2025, we paid $12,850 to the publisher. This charge was for open-access fees, now required by the publisher, and was non-negotiable.

Research findings, especially those produced through taxpayer-funded research, should be available without barriers. Expensive open-access fees pose substantial barriers to making research open to the public.

The well-intentioned NIH policy change was intended to provide free, immediate, public access to publications resulting from NIH-funded research. NIH-funded authors must deposit the peer-reviewed (“author-accepted version”) of the manuscript in PubMed Central, a public access repository, to be made available at the time of publication in the journal (i.e., without embargo). Beginning in July 2025, many nonprofit publishers removed their requirement for embargoes on author-accepted manuscripts in PubMed Central, making articles by NIH authors free and immediately available.

However, some for-profit publishers — e.g., Springer Nature, Elsevier, and Wiley, which publish a combined total of over 7,500 journals — require that authors sign over copyright and control of the author-accepted version of their paper to the publisher and have not changed their requirements for an embargo (typically six to 12 months) in PubMed Central.

Before, scientists could publish through the “subscription route” (with a six- to 12-month embargo period) and avoid any open-access fees. Now, to remove the embargo period, NIH-funded scientists must use the publishers’ “open-access route” to comply with the NIH Public Access Policy. For the open-access route, these publishers require fees that range from $4,840 (Wiley, Cancer), $9,550 (Elsevier, The Lancet), to $12,850 (Springer Nature, Nature, and Nature Medicine).

There has been a great amount written about our “broken” peer-review system, whereby taxpayers are supporting the research, scientists are volunteering their time (often, lots of time) to peer-review the articles resulting from this research, and college and university libraries are paying small fortunes (typically millions of dollars annually to publishers) so their faculty and students can access journal articles. Journal editors don’t seem to make huge salaries, but the for-profit publishers are raking in cash. Springer Nature, for example, reported $635 million in profits in 2025.

The current NIH Public Access Policy has put NIH-funded scientists in a terrible predicament. Our research group is just one of numerous highly productive, almost entirely NIH-funded scientific teams. We have many, many wonderful trainees who are leading exciting work, and almost all of them will publish papers resulting from these projects. Our Ph.D. students are required to produce a minimum of three publishable papers before graduation, and many publish considerably more.

But the journals I used to recommend to my trainees are now unaffordable. There is also simply the principle of the issue: Why should I now pay $8,810 to publish in Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology simply because the publisher has refused to allow for zero-embargo (immediate) public access to my peer-reviewed paper as required by federal policy?

I am told that federal law can supersede certain contracts. But even putting aside the ethics and legalities of breaking a signed contract with a publisher by placing my author-accepted version in PubMed Central without an embargo, I suspect there are practical issues. It may be possible for publishers to prevent authors from breaking an embargo because they have back-end access to the PubMed Central system. A publisher could also decide to punish investigators or institutions, perhaps by withdrawing the paper, preventing future submissions, or even suing the authors and/or their institutions.

Running a journal is expensive and a lot of work. I know this because I am a deputy editor of Diabetes Care, which is published by the American Diabetes Association. Our expense budget is approximately $1.3 million. We have full-time staff who manage the peer-review process, edit, and produce the journal. Our editor-in-chief and our deputy editors receive modest honoraria for running the journal, which includes the evaluation of more than 2,000 papers per year. Our associate editors receive $100 for every manuscript they handle. Our editorial board members and other reviewers volunteer their time to review our submissions; they gain valuable professional experience, networking opportunities, and exposure to cutting-edge ideas in the field. Diabetes Care is available online, but it is also a physical journal — we pay printing and mailing costs. We receive some print and online advertising revenue (approximately $120,000 per year), which helps pay the bills and, to further offset our costs, we charge authors $250 per typeset page (original research articles are typically about eight or nine pages).

Discounts and waivers are available for authors who are unable to afford this fee. For federally funded research, we automatically deposit the final published version of the article into PubMed Central on the authors’ behalf with no embargo. This approach demonstrates that it is possible to run a journal and comply with federal policy without requiring NIH-funded authors to pay outrageous amounts of money in open-access fees.

I have been encouraging my trainees and colleagues to avoid journals that require expensive open-access fees for compliance with NIH policy. Unfortunately, this rules out many journals in our field. It does, however, allow us to feel comfortable that we are using our valuable grant money on doing science rather than producing earnings for owners and shareholders of for-profit publishing businesses. I also believe we should support nonprofit journals that reinvest their funds back into journal operations rather than maximize shareholder profits.

Recently the editor of Nature asked me to peer-review a submitted article. I sent a polite response: “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.” I encourage other NIH-funded scientists to do the same.

Elizabeth Selvin, Ph.D., M.P.H., is director of the Welch Center for Epidemiology and clinical research professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The opinions expressed herein are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of Johns Hopkins University. She is also a deputy editor of Diabetes Care and receives an honorarium from the American Diabetes Association for her work. The author thanks Elizabeth Whipple and Barbara Pralle, both at the Johns Hopkins Welch Medical Library, for their feedback on this article.