Who Can Afford to Publish Publicly Funded Science?

What is it about?

In 2025, the National Institutes of Health began requiring that all federally funded research be made freely available to the public immediately upon publication. This is a meaningful milestone for open science. But it leaves an important question unanswered: who can afford to publish it? Researchers compete for funding, conduct the work, write the papers, and review each other's manuscripts without pay. They also increasingly pay thousands of dollars in fees just to publish their results. These charges now routinely exceed $3,000 and can reach $12,000 or more, falling hardest on early-career investigators and those at smaller institutions. Meanwhile, academic publishing is dominated by a small number of commercial publishers with profit margins approaching 40%. We argue that without addressing these structural problems, access policies risk shifting barriers rather than eliminating them: from who can read science to who can afford to produce it. Nonprofit publishing, institutional funds, and existing federal rights to publicly funded research offer more equitable paths forward.

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Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This piece matters for anyone who conducts, funds, reads, or benefits from publicly funded research. The NIH Public Access Policy is a landmark achievement, but publication fees are quietly reshaping who can participate in science. Early-career investigators, researchers at smaller institutions, and those working in under-resourced fields face real barriers to publishing — barriers that can influence not just careers, but what research gets done at all. By naming these structural problems and pointing toward alternatives, this Perspective aims to broaden the conversation about open science beyond access to include affordability, equity, and democratic governance of the scientific record.

Perspectives