“The data look great, but I am not sure if we can afford a publication in Nature Communications.” The PhD candidate looks unhappy. She is ambitious and feels that publishing in prestigious journals is important for her career, but her group is struggling financially. Is it really worth spending €6,000 on Article Processing Charges for a single paper? For International Open Access Week, we looked into the publishing habits of Radboudumc researchers. Our estimate: publications with Radboudumc senior authors represented approximately €3.8 million in potential Article Processing Charges in 2025. Along the way, we also observed some interesting publishing trends.
Publishing is not free. Already from the 1930s, authors contributed to the costs of making their knowledge public by paying page charges to publishers, while readers paid for access through journal subscriptions. Paying per page was probably also a nice stimulus to avoid wordy prose and get to the point.
Since the 2000s, large publishing houses have increasingly offered fully Open Access (OA) publications, where readers can freely access articles online while Article Processing Charges (APCs) are covered by authors, their research grants, or institutions. Traditional publishers such as Elsevier and Springer also introduced hybrid models, in which subscription journals allow authors to make individual articles openly accessible, usually in exchange for an APC.
With approximately 4,600 articles published by Radboudumc researchers in 2025, we became curious: where do we publish, and how much might we be paying in APCs?
Who picks up the publishing bill?
We had to make some assumptions here. Who actually pays the publishing bill? Despite the Dutch love for Tikkies and splitting bills, we assumed that the last author of an article represents the research group primarily responsible for the APC.
Using code to extract data from publicly available sources such as PubMed and OpenAlex, we found approximately 1,740 articles with a Radboudumc senior author in 2025.
Over the period 2015–2025, we see a gradual increase in the proportion of articles published in Gold and Hybrid journals. Diamond OA publications, which are free for both authors and readers, made up only about 5% in 2025. It is also striking that since 2022, the proportion of our articles published through some form of Open Access seems to have plateaued at around 75%.
Figure 1. Open Access status over time of articles published by last authors from Radboudumc. Diamond: free of charge for readers and authors; Gold: fully OA journal, generally in exchange for an APC; Hybrid: subscription journal in which individual articles can be made OA, generally in exchange for an APC; Green: available through the journal and also archived in an OA repository, such as a preprint server; Bronze: free to read on the publisher’s website without an open license, but access can be delayed or removed; Closed: available only through subscription.
How much do we pay?
This brings us back to the dilemma of our PhD candidate. How much does publishing actually cost?
A single publication in a fully OA journal from publishers such as Frontiers or BioMed Central typically costs €2,000–3,500. And it can be much more. Publishing an OA article in Nature not only earns admiration, and perhaps a tinge of jealousy, from colleagues, it also comes with an APC of around €10,000.
We will not go into the benefits of high-profile journals, their craftful typesetting, or the other services publishers may provide. Nor will we comment on what is realistically needed to keep academic journals financially afloat. Rather than kicking those beehives, we simply estimated the potential APC bill.
For 2025, publications with Radboudumc senior authors represented approximately €3.8 million in APC exposure.
That does not mean Radboudumc researchers actually transferred €3.8 million to publishers. Some of these costs will be covered through publishing agreements between Dutch universities and publishing houses. But it is fair to assume that a substantial part ultimately comes from research grants, direct government funding (Eerste Geldstroom), or some other form of taxpayers’ money.
Figure 2. Estimated APC exposure for Gold and Hybrid OA articles over time, based on articles published by last authors from Radboudumc. The estimate does not account for publishing agreements, waivers, or other arrangements with publishers.
Who can afford to publish?
As a smaller but very real challenge, APCs can also create disparities between researchers, depending on the funding situation of their research group. The PhD candidate from our introduction may simply have fewer options than a colleague working in a well-funded group.
This raises the question of what the future of academic publishing will look like, and what authors and research funders are willing to pay for publication.
The Gates Foundation, a major funder of global health research, no longer considers journal publication costs eligible for reimbursement. In essence, the funder pays “until the preprint.”
This option does not yet seem to be fully embraced by Radboudumc researchers, either as an early form of publication or, perhaps, as the final product. In 2025, approximately 215 manuscripts from Radboudumc were archived on the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv. This green route to OA makes research findings immediately available.
Some funders have also started their own OA publishing platforms, where preprints and updated versions following reviewer comments remain visible.During Open Access Week, it therefore seems worth talking about where we want to publish our findings. And whether it is really worth spending €6,000 from a research grant to publish data that could also be made available free of charge.
Blog by Jordache Ramjith, Teun Bousema and Laura de Vries
-
Want to know more about these subjects? Click on the buttons below for more news.
