Complying with the NIH’s public access policy could add as much as $104 million a year in article processing fees for NIH-funded researchers, according to a modeling study published Aug. 24 in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The NIH updated its Public Access Policy in July 2025 to require manuscripts from NIH-funded studies be freely available immediately on publication, ending the embargoes publishers had been allowed to enforce. Authors can comply at no cost by depositing manuscripts in PubMed Central, but many publishers still delay free access unless authors pay an article processing charge — often several thousand dollars per paper, according to the study.
To quantify the potential burden, researchers led by Ryan Huebinger, MD, of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, used NIH RePORTER, OpenAlex and OpenAPC to model costs for NIH-funded manuscripts published in 2024, the last full year under the old policy.
Of 93,783 manuscripts tied to NIH grants that year, 30,619 — about 33% — could face new article processing charges to meet the updated rule. If every affected author paid, the fees would total an estimated $104.1 million, at an average of about $4,300 per paper.
Early-career investigators would absorb a disproportionate share. The study estimated $35.6 million of the total would fall on authors funded by training grants that carry limited budgets.
The authors called $104 million a high-end figure that likely overstates the real cost, since not all journals require an article processing charge for compliance. For comparison, federal estimates put total article processing charge spending across all federally funded research near $400 million a year.
The estimate arrives as the NIH weighs capping what grantees can pay in publication fees, a change set to begin in fiscal year 2026. Those caps “may not fully cover APCs [article processing charges] for many journals,” the authors wrote, potentially leaving investigators to make up the difference.
For academic medical centers with large NIH portfolios, the findings put a number on a growing cost of federally funded research that could land hardest on the trainees and smaller institutions least able to absorb it.
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