2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The United States National Institute of Health (NIH) is a major funder of scientific research, acknowledged by over 113,000 journal articles in calendar year 2025. On July 8, 2025 NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya announced a review of allowable publication costs such as Article Processing Charges (APCs) that can be paid with NIH grant funds. The agency released a Request for Information (RFI) with several suggested scenarios, including a cap on APCs.

To better understand and anticipate the effect of a proposed APC cap limit, this paper investigates characteristics of NIH-funded papers published in 2025. Specifically, we look at how many NIH-funded articles were published, what journals they appeared in, and what each journal’s specific APC charge would be. Using the Dimensions database, records for 2025 articles that acknowledge NIH funding were exported and summarized as counts by journal. We then combine the counts with journal-level APC prices from major academic publishers to match journals to the specific APC fee levied during 2025.

Using this data, the effect of any potential APC cap can be simulated. The percentage of NIH articles and the percentage of journals that would fall above and below a given price cap level can be shown. For example, a hypothetical $2,000 allowable APC limit would cover 5.76% of journals and 5.08% of NIH-funded articles, assuming 2025 publication patterns are typical.

Data and code supporting this analysis are publicly available at https://github.com/eschares/ASEE-NIH-caps.