An analysis of 2024 journal manuscripts found that authors would have to pay journals up to $104 million in additional article processing charges each year under an updated NIH policy that took effect in July 2025.The policy could cause financial problems and uncertainty for researchers.The policy may be especially hard on investigators who are early in their careers and institutions with limited resources.
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.
