New NIH Rule Could Cost Researchers $104 Million a Year in Journal Fees

NIH wants taxpayer-funded research public the moment it's published. But the way it's playing out, researchers may be paying publishers up to $104 million a year for the privilege of complying, according to a research letter by Ryan Huebinger, MD, of the University of New Mexico, published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Huebinger's team looked at roughly 24,000 manuscripts tied to NIH grants in 2024 that would likely need to pay fees under the new rule. They found article processing charges for the relevant journal types typically run $2,900 to $4,200, though Huebinger told MedPage Today some publishers charge as much as $12,000 per article.

Huebinger was careful to caveat his own numbers. "We can't say exactly how much it would cost because we don't know how much many of these publishers could be charging," he said, adding that the estimates are "high-end." That's an honest disclosure. This is a projection built on average APC data, not a tally of actual invoices sent to researchers.

Still, the scale of the estimate lines up with a separate warning. The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported in June that if federal grant funds are used to cover these fees, the policy could cost the federal government $1 billion a year. That's taxpayer money, potentially funneled straight into publisher profit margins for a service researchers may not need to pay for at all.

The Part NIH Already Solved

NIH built a free system for exactly this purpose. It's called the NIH Manuscript Submission System, and it lets authors deposit their accepted manuscripts, the version before a journal's copyediting and formatting, into PubMed Central without paying anyone a dime.

NIH has also explicitly barred grant funds from being used to pay publishers just to submit that accepted manuscript to PMC, according to Cary Gross, MD, of Yale, writing in an accompanying JAMA Internal Medicine editorial. The free mechanism already exists. Researchers have the legal right to use it.

The problem is publishers aren't playing along uniformly. Some journals let authors comply for free, using the version-before-editing route. Others demand an open-access fee before they'll let the work move forward at all, effectively charging researchers to do what NIH already gives them a free path to do.

Gross singled out JAMA's own network as an example of journals that don't require authors to pay for compliance. "Other publishers should follow suit," he wrote. That's a direct, on-record call from a named source at the journal publishing this very research, not a hypothetical.

Who Actually Pays

The people most exposed here aren't tenured professors with fat grant budgets. Huebinger's team calculated that $35.59 million of the total projected cost would fall on early-career investigators holding training grants, researchers whose budgets are already tight and weren't built with these fees in mind.

This is worth taking seriously. It's the strongest case critics of the policy's rollout can make: a rule meant to open up science could end up pricing out the scientists with the least room to absorb new costs. Gross's editorial calls this a "significant strain on the clinical research system," even as he credits the underlying open-access goal as "a meaningful advance."

That's a fair distinction. The policy's aim, taxpayer-funded research should be free and immediate for the public to read, is hard to argue with. Locking publicly funded discoveries behind paywalls never made sense. The execution is the issue. Publishers are charging researchers for a workaround to a rule that already has a free compliance path built in.

What Happens Next

No federal investigation or enforcement action against publishers has been announced. This is a cost-estimate study, not a regulatory finding, and Huebinger's own numbers are explicitly high-end projections rather than confirmed billing data.

The question is whether NIH will crack down on publishers that refuse to honor the free manuscript-deposit option, or whether more journals will voluntarily follow JAMA's lead. Until then, researchers, especially the early-career ones with the least financial cushion, are left deciding whether to pay publishers thousands of dollars per paper or fight for a free alternative the rule was supposed to guarantee them in the first place.