Article Processing Charges (APCs): What Authors Need to Know

Article processing charges are the fees that authors — or their institutions and funders — pay to make a scientific paper freely available to readers upon publication. They have become one of the most financially consequential decisions in modern research dissemination, reshaping how science is funded, who can publish, and what happens to the peer-review system along the way.

Definition and scope

An article processing charge is a payment made to a journal publisher in exchange for open access publication of a peer-reviewed article. The fee is typically paid after peer review and acceptance, though some journals require upfront payment. The resulting article is published under a license — most commonly Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) — that permits any reader to download, share, and reuse the work without a subscription.

APCs are not a single, uniform thing. They range from zero (at journals that receive institutional or society funding) to well above $10,000 at flagship journals. Nature and Science, through their open access variants Nature Communications and Science Advances, charged APCs of $2,590 and $4,995 respectively as of 2023 (Springer Nature APC list; AAAS open access fees). The New England Journal of Medicine's open access option reached $3,900. At the other end of the spectrum, journals published through the Public Library of Science (PLOS) have structured their fees on a cost-recovery basis, with PLOS Biology listing $3,250 and PLOS ONE at $1,805 as of 2023 (PLOS publication fees).

The open access publishing landscape encompasses three distinct models that interact with APCs differently: gold open access (immediate free availability on the journal's site, funded by APCs), green open access (author self-archiving in a repository, no APC required), and diamond open access (free to read and free to publish, funded by institutions or grants). APCs are the financial engine of gold open access specifically.

How it works

The mechanics are straightforward, though the path to payment is less so.

  1. Submission and peer review — The author submits a manuscript. Peer review proceeds without cost to the author in most cases, though some journals charge submission fees.
  2. Acceptance — Once a paper is accepted, the publisher sends an APC invoice. At this stage, many publishers offer a waiver request process for authors from low-income countries, a practice documented by the Research4Life program (Research4Life eligibility).
  3. Payment or waiver confirmation — The author, institution, or funder pays the APC, or a waiver is granted. Many universities now have APC funds specifically for this purpose.
  4. License selection — The author selects a Creative Commons license. Funders frequently mandate CC BY; the federal open access mandate in the United States, updated through the 2022 OSTP policy memo, requires immediate open access for federally funded research, which drives APC demand at many institutions.
  5. Publication — The article goes live, freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

The invoicing step often surprises first-time authors. Seeing a four-figure invoice arrive after months of revision is a jarring introduction to the economics of publishing.

Common scenarios

Scenario A — Grant-funded research: A researcher funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) publishes in a high-impact journal. NIH's public access policy, implemented through PubMed Central, requires deposit of the accepted manuscript, but if the researcher pays the journal APC, the version-of-record becomes immediately available rather than after a 12-month embargo. The APC is a permissible direct cost on most NIH grants (NIH Public Access Policy).

Scenario B — Institutional read-and-publish agreements: Major research universities have negotiated "transformative agreements" with publishers like Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley, where a single institutional fee covers both journal subscriptions and APC payments for affiliated authors. The number of such agreements tracked by the ESAC Registry exceeded 700 globally by 2023 (ESAC Registry).

Scenario C — No funding, no waiver: An independent researcher or one at an institution without an APC fund submits to an open access journal, receives acceptance, and faces the full charge out-of-pocket. This scenario is more common than the system's architects intended, and it sits at the center of ongoing equity debates in the research ethics and publication standards conversation.

Scenario D — Hybrid journal: A subscription journal offers individual articles as open access for an APC, while the rest of the issue remains paywalled. Critics, including cOAlition S (the European funder consortium behind Plan S), have argued that hybrid journals enable "double dipping" — collecting both subscription revenue and APCs for the same content.

Decision boundaries

Deciding whether to pay an APC — and which journal's APC — involves at least four distinct considerations:

The broader picture of how APCs fit into the scientific publishing system — including journal indexing databases, copyright and licensing in scientific publishing, and the economics behind major scientific journal publishers — is covered across this reference's main topic index.

References

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