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A new federal policy designed to make taxpayer-funded research freely available to the public is creating larger profits for private publishers and higher costs for researchers, STAT reported.
Beginning in July 2025, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) required that research funded by the agency be made publicly accessible immediately upon publication.
The policy is designed to ensure that studies supported by public dollars are available without subscription barriers, so that patients, clinicians, researchers and the general public can access scientific findings more quickly.
In principle, the policy has wide support. However, some researchers say it has created an unexpected problem: higher costs for researchers to publish their work in for-profit academic journals.
The policy affects over 7,500 journals, from publishers including Springer Nature, Elsevier and Wiley. These three publishers own over 55% of the academic journal market share — and they publish some of the most cited and trusted health science journals.
In a recent commentary published by STAT, Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Elizabeth Selvin, Ph.D., described how the change in NIH policy affected publication expenses for her research team
In 2025, her group published an NIH-funded clinical trial in Nature Medicine without paying publication fees. In 2026, after the NIH policy took effect, the team paid $12,850 in open-access charges to publish another NIH-funded study in the same journal.
The increase is an example of how journals use public-access requirements, which are meant to provide a public service, to boost their own profits.
Under the NIH policy, researchers must ensure that peer-reviewed manuscripts resulting from NIH-funded work are available in PubMed Central immediately upon publication.
PubMed, a free and publicly available resource provided by the National Library of Medicine, is considered an authoritative source for archived biomedical research.
In the past, many journals enforced an embargo period after publication before making an article available in PubMed. This allowed researchers to publish their papers at no cost, and the research was available exclusively to journal subscribers for 6-12 months before becoming open access.
Once the new NIH policy was established, many nonprofit publishers adjusted their policies to allow authors to deposit accepted manuscripts without embargo periods. However, large commercial publishers continue to require embargoes on authors’ manuscripts unless authors select an open-access publishing option that includes additional fees.
As a result, researchers seeking to publish in top journals and comply with NIH requirements may face substantial publication costs. According to Selvin, open-access fees at major publishers can range from approximately $4,840 to $12,850, depending on the journal.
To publish in top journals such as The Lancet or Nature, researchers must pay those costs.
Publishing costs for journals are outsourced to governments, researchers and universities, but journals get the profit
Major scientific publishers have low costs, because research is often funded by government grants, universities, foundations, or other public and nonprofit sources. Authors write up their research for free. Peer review, a central component of scientific quality control, is typically conducted by volunteer researchers with jobs as academics.
Many journals have also started to eliminate copy editor positions, turning to AI as a less expensive alternative — which editors say has introduced scientifically significant errors.
University libraries — also often funded with government and foundation grants — pay high subscription charges for university staff and students to access journals.
Journal editors, who oversee editorial processes, production and dissemination of research, don’t have particularly high salaries, Selvin wrote, but publishers are “raking in cash.”
Publishers argue that these services require significant resources and investment.
But for years — even before the new NIH policy went into effect — researchers have been raising concerns about inflated open-access fees they say don’t accurately reflect those costs, particularly for highly profitable publishing companies.
Selvin said these costs can affect what research can be done and also affect people’s careers — particularly early-career scholars.
Publication fees are generally paid from research budgets, meaning funds allocated for dissemination may reduce resources available for other scientific activities. Graduate students and early-career researchers can be particularly affected because publication records are often critical for career advancement.
Springer Nature, a public company and one of the world’s largest scientific publishers, reported approximately $635 million in profits in 2025, Selvin reported. Wiley reported over $84 million in profits in 2025. Elsevier’s parent company, RELX, reported over $4.4 billion in profits.
Publishers have become ‘too greedy’
In December 2024, the entire editorial board of Elsevier’s Journal of Human Evolution resigned, citing, among other things, the high fees the journal charged for making articles publicly available.
The entire academic board of Elsevier’s NeuroImage quit in 2023, accusing the journal of being “too greedy.”
NeuroImage’s former editors said the cost to publish open access articles was “unethical” and has no relation to the costs involved in publishing.
Some resigning editors, including professor Chris Chambers, Ph.D., head of brain stimulation at Cardiff University in Wales, called for other scientists to stop publishing with for-profit publishers and instead submit their research to nonprofit open-access journals, The Guardian reported.
Elsevier defended the costs, saying their costs to publish open-access articles in NeuroImage were below those of the nearest competitor. They said they are committed to supporting open access research.
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Alternative models
Selvin proposed an alternative model that some nonprofit journals have adopted.
For example, Diabetes Care, published by the American Diabetes Association, charges modest page fees, offers waivers when needed and deposits federally funded articles into PubMed Central without embargoes.
It maintains its operations through a combination of publication charges, advertising revenue and other funding sources.
The Conversation proposed a “publish-review-curate” model, where authors publish research as preprints online, then move through peer review.
This model has become increasingly popular in the last several years, but it also has drawbacks. Preprint servers can have unclear processes for peer review, and final articles can differ from original posts, creating some confusion.
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