Researchers Could Pay $100M to Comply With NIH Publishing Policy

NIH-funded researchers could pay journal publishers as much as $104 million per year in additional fees to comply with NIH’s updated policy that requires manuscripts to be publicly available as soon as they are published.

That’s the total estimated by assessing about 24,000 manuscripts associated with NIH grants in 2024 that would likely have to pay to comply with the policy, Ryan Huebinger, MD, of the University of New Mexico, and colleagues reported in a research letter in JAMA Internal Medicine.

“We can’t say exactly how much it would cost because we don’t know how much many of these publishers could be charging” under the new policy, Huebinger told MedPage Today, with a public relations representative on the call. He emphasized that his study’s estimates are “high-end.”

For certain types of journals and manuscripts, the average article processing charge (APC) can range from $2,900 to $4,200, he said. Other reporting has suggested that APCs can run as high as $12,000 per article.

Indeed, a report in June from the U.S. Government Accountability Office suggested that if federal funds were used, the policy could cost the federal government $1 billion per year.

Huebinger and colleagues also reported that $35.59 million of the total would have been paid by early-career investigators with training grants.

“This amount could create financial challenges for investigators with limited grant budgets or existing budgets that did not account for paying APCs for NIH policy compliance,” the authors wrote.

The new NIH policy went into effect in July 2025, requiring that each NIH-funded manuscript be uploaded to PubMed Central (PMC) immediately when it is published in a journal. Legally, authors can deposit accepted manuscripts — before journal editorial services come into play — into PMC. Still, researchers may be unaware of this right, and publishers require hefty open-access payments to compensate them for lost subscription payments given the new policy.

In an accompanying editorial, Cary Gross, MD, of Yale, and an associate editor of JAMA Internal Medicine, wrote the NIH’s policy “is a meaningful advance toward open science, but also introduces significant strain on the clinical research system.”

Part of the problem with these substantial fees, Gross wrote, is that “NIH specifically disallows the use of NIH funds to pay for submission of author accepted manuscript to PMC, given that there is already a free mechanism for such submissions.” That’s the NIH Manuscript Submission System, which allows authors to deposit author-accepted manuscripts without the involvement of the publisher.

The other problem is that journals do not have consistent policies on whether or not they require authors to pay to comply with the new NIH policy. Some do, including all journals in the JAMA network, Gross said. “Other publishers should follow suit,” he wrote.

“For journals that will not allow authors to adhere to the NIH Public Access Policy without paying a fee, this should be made explicit in their instructions for authors, allowing authors to choose a different publication venue,” he wrote.

Another cause for confusion is that researchers upload their manuscripts as they are accepted, but that’s not the final edited, error-corrected, and fact-checked version. The final article published on PMC may be slightly or significantly different, he said in an interview with MedPage Today.

Another concern about the new policy is the Trump administration’s proposed rule which, if finalized, would prohibit any NIH funds from being used for publication costs, including APCs or similar fees such as open access fees for professional journal publications and other peer-reviewed publications.

Additionally, the NIH has considered imposing caps on how much of a federal grant can be used to pay APCs. This could cause costs to be passed on to the investigators, Huebinger said.

“If that’s the case,” Gross told MedPage Today, “that would dramatically impact the ability of authors to publish and disseminate their work. Then the dollars would have to come out of their own pocket or their own non-research funds to pay to publish their work.”

In an accompanying viewpoint, Adam Markovitz, MD, PhD, of the University of Michigan, and colleagues noted significant confusion among researchers over how to comply with the policy amid varying “pay to comply” models from publishers.

While the NIH does not require APC payment to the journal to comply with agency policy, “it has not publicly defended this position against publisher practices to the contrary,” Markowitz wrote.

While immediate public access to NIH-funded science can have broad public benefit, “publishers’ pay-to-comply practices threaten to turn public access into private author tolls, replacing one barrier with another,” he wrote.