Open access fees prevent NIH-funded research from reaching the public

In June 2025, I led a study that was accepted for publication in Nature Medicine. The cost of publishing this manuscript, which reported the results of a randomized clinical trial, was zero dollars. The paper has undergone rigorous peer review and numerous edits and revisions by the editorial team. This study is the result of years of work by a large team of Johns Hopkins staff and researchers 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 another NIH-funded study in Nature Medicine – also the result of years of hard work supported by yours and my tax dollars. To comply with the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy that took effect July 1, 2025, we paid $12,850 to the publisher. These fees related to the open access fees, now required by the publisher, and were not negotiable.

Research results, especially those from taxpayer-funded research, should be accessible without barriers. High open access fees pose considerable obstacles to opening research to the public.

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

However, some for-profit publishers—for example, Springer Nature, Elsevier, and Wiley, which publish more than 7,500 journals in total—require that authors relinquish copyright and control of the author-accepted version of their article to the publisher and have not changed their embargo requirements (typically six to 12 months) in PubMed Central.

Previously, scientists could publish by “subscription” (with an embargo period of six to 12 months) and avoid open access fees. Now, to lift the embargo period, NIH-funded scientists must use the publishers’ “open access pathway” to comply with the NIH public access policy. For the open access route, these publishers charge fees ranging from $4,840 (Wiley, Cancer), $9,550 (Elsevier, The Lancet) to $12,850 (Springer Nature, Nature and Nature Medicine).

Much has been written about our “failed” peer review system, in which taxpayers support research, scientists donate their time (often, lots of time) to peer review articles resulting from that research, and college and university libraries pay small fortunes (usually millions of dollars a year to publishers) so their professors and students can access journal articles. Newspaper editors don’t seem to make huge salaries, but for-profit publishers are raking in money. Springer Nature, for example, reported $635 million in profits in 2025.

The current NIH public access policy has placed NIH-funded scientists in a terrible situation. Our research group is just one of many highly productive scientific teams, almost entirely funded by the NIH. We have many, many wonderful interns doing exciting work, and almost all of them will publish papers resulting from these projects. Our Ph.D. students must produce at least three publishable articles before graduation, and many publish many more.

But the magazines that I recommended to my interns are now unaffordable. There is also simply the principle of the problem: why should I now pay $8,810 to publish in Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology simply because the publisher refused to allow embargo-free (immediate) public access to my peer-reviewed article, as required by federal policy?

I am told that federal law can supersede certain contracts. But even setting 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 problems. It may be possible for publishers to prevent authors from breaking an embargo because they have back-end access to the PubMed Central system. An editor could also decide to punish the investigators or institutions, perhaps by retracting the article, preventing future submissions, or even suing the authors and/or their institutions.

Keeping a journal is expensive and requires a lot of work. I know this because I am an associate editor of Diabetes Care, published by the American Diabetes Association. Our spending budget is approximately $1.3 million. We have a full-time staff who manage the peer review process, edit and produce the journal. Our Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editors receive a modest honorarium for running the journal, which includes reviewing over 2,000 articles per year. Our associate editors receive $100 for each manuscript they handle. Members of our editorial board 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 for printing and mailing costs. We receive print and online advertising revenue (about $120,000 per year), which helps us pay the bills, and to further offset our costs, we charge authors $250 per composed page (original research articles are typically about eight or nine pages).

Discounts and waivers are available for authors who cannot afford these fees. For federally funded research, we automatically deposit the final published version of the article in PubMed Central on behalf of the authors, without embargo. This approach demonstrates that it is possible to run a journal and comply with federal policy without requiring NIH-funded authors to pay exorbitant sums in open access fees.

I encouraged my trainees and colleagues to avoid journals that require high open access fees to comply with NIH policy. Unfortunately, this excludes many journals in our field. It does, however, give us confidence that we are using our valuable grants to do science rather than to produce revenue for the owners and shareholders of for-profit publishing companies. I also think we should support nonprofit journals that reinvest their funds into their operations rather than maximizing 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 to comply with NIH policy. Until the publisher adopts more equitable pricing practices, I do not believe I can volunteer my time to support its journals.” I encourage other NIH-funded scientists to do the same.

Elizabeth Selvin, Ph.D., MPH, is director of the Welch Center for Epidemiology and professor of clinical research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Johns Hopkins University. She also serves as deputy editor of Diabetes Care and receives honoraria from the American Diabetes Association for her work. The author thanks Elizabeth Whipple and Barbara Pralle, both of the Johns Hopkins Welch Medical Library, for their comments on this article.