Most researchers assume a published paper’s cost begins and ends with the Article Processing Charge (APC) if the journal is open access, or is free if it isn’t. Neither assumption holds up in practice. Depending on the journal, discipline, and route to publication, a single article can carry costs at several distinct points: before submission, at acceptance, and after publication — and several of these are easy to miss when budgeting a grant or a lab’s annual publishing spend.
This guide covers the full cost picture. For a detailed treatment of Article Processing Charges specifically — how they’re set, who pays them, and how waivers and Read & Publish agreements work — see Article Processing Charges (APCs) for Open Access. If you’re budgeting against NIH funding specifically, see NIH Open Access Publishing Fee Limits. This page is the map of everything else around the APC: submission fees, page and color charges, and the smaller costs that rarely appear in a journal’s headline fee schedule.
Do journals charge to submit a paper?
Most do not. The great majority of journals across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities accept manuscript submissions for review at no charge — the cost, if any, is only assessed on acceptance. Where a submission fee exists, it is charged simply to have the manuscript considered for peer review, regardless of the outcome, and is separate from and in addition to any acceptance-stage fee.
Submission fees are most common in a specific set of contexts:
- Economics journals, where a submission fee (often in the roughly $25–$150 range) has long been standard practice, partly to offset the discipline’s typically slow, resource-intensive review process and partly to discourage low-effort mass submissions.
- Some society and specialty journals in other fields that charge a modest fee to help fund editorial administration, particularly where the society runs the journal without a large commercial publisher’s infrastructure behind it.
- Certain high-volume or high-prestige journals that use a submission fee partly as a filter against low-quality or speculative submissions.
A submission fee is a useful signal to check for two reasons: it is easy to overlook when comparing journals purely by APC, and its presence or absence has no bearing on whether a journal is legitimate — but an unusually structured or unusually high submission fee combined with other warning signs is one factor worth weighing when screening for a predatory journal. See How to Identify Predatory Journals and Publishers for the fuller checklist.
Article Processing Charges (APCs): the largest single cost, for open-access routes
For any journal published under gold open access or a hybrid open-access model (see Gold vs. Green vs. Diamond vs. Hybrid Open Access for how hybrid compares to the other routes), the APC is typically the largest single publishing cost by a wide margin — often the only cost most authors ever see quoted. Reported ranges vary substantially by publisher and journal prestige: many mid-tier, multidisciplinary gold open-access journals charge roughly $1,000–$3,000, while flagship or highly selective titles can charge $5,000 and, at the top end, well over $10,000. Hybrid journals (subscription journals that also offer a paid open-access option per article) tend to charge above that mid-tier range on average.
The mechanics of how APCs are set, who is actually liable to pay them (the author is rarely the one who pays out of pocket), waiver and discount programs for authors without institutional or funder support, and how transformative agreements (Read & Publish deals between institutions and publishers) are changing who foots the bill are covered in full in the dedicated APC guide — this page won’t repeat that detail. What matters for a full cost picture is simply this: if you’re comparing the total cost of publishing across journals, the APC (or its absence, for diamond open access and most green open access routes) is the number to check first, before any of the smaller costs below.
If your work is NIH-funded, budget with the proposed APC cap in mind — see the dedicated guide on NIH’s proposed limits on grant-funded publishing fees before assuming a grant will cover a journal’s full quoted APC.
Page charges and color/figure charges
Before open access existed as a business model, many subscription journals — particularly in physics, chemistry, and engineering society publishing — recovered typesetting and print costs directly from authors through page charges: a per-page fee assessed once a manuscript is accepted, independent of any open-access election. Page charges have declined significantly as the industry shifted toward digital-first and open-access models, but they have not disappeared entirely; some society journals (notably in optics, physics, and IEEE-affiliated titles) still assess them, commonly in a rough range of $100–$300 per printed page, sometimes with a smaller per-page rate above a free page allowance.
Separately, many journals that still produce a print edition charge extra for figures reproduced in color in the print version — typically several hundred dollars per color figure — even though the same figure displays in color at no extra charge in the online HTML/PDF version. This is worth checking explicitly before submission if your figures rely on color to convey information (e.g., heat maps, fluorescence imaging, overlaid data series): the charge applies to the print run, not the online record, and some journals waive it automatically once the article is otherwise open access, so it’s a cost that can be double-counted or missed entirely depending on which version of the journal’s fee schedule you read.
The costs that rarely show up on a fee schedule
The following are real, recurring costs in academic publishing that are easy to miss because they’re not itemized on a journal’s standard APC/page-charge page — they’re either optional, discipline-specific, or billed by a third party rather than the journal itself.
English-language editing
For authors writing in a non-native language, professional English-language editing (distinct from peer review, and typically done before submission) is a real and sometimes substantial cost. Journals and publishers increasingly recommend or partner with third-party editing services; pricing from established academic editing providers generally scales with word count and turnaround speed, commonly landing somewhere between roughly $200 and $1,000+ for a full-length research article, depending on depth of edit and urgency. This is not a fee charged by the journal itself and is not required by most journals, but it’s a real, non-trivial line item for many international research teams and worth budgeting for separately from any journal-side fee.
Reprints and offprints
After acceptance, many journals offer authors the option to purchase physical reprints (bound copies of the published article) or, less commonly today, offprints. These are optional and increasingly rare as a practical need now that PDFs and open-access links serve the same purpose, but some institutions, industry sponsors, or authors in fields with strong print-culture norms (e.g., some clinical and pharmaceutical contexts) still order them, and publishers typically price them per unit with steep quantity-based tiers — a cost that can run into the hundreds of dollars for even a modest quantity. If you don’t have a specific institutional or sponsor requirement for physical copies, this is usually the easiest cost on this page to skip entirely.
Cover image and graphical abstract fees
Some journals, particularly in chemistry and materials science (notably several ACS and RSC titles), invite accepted authors to submit artwork for consideration as the issue’s cover image, and charge a fee — often on the order of several hundred to over a thousand dollars — if the image is selected and used. This is optional, prestige-driven, and entirely separate from the APC or any mandatory publication fee; declining it has no effect on whether or how the article itself is published.
Supplementary data, permissions, and reuse fees
Two other costs are worth checking for depending on the manuscript: fees for depositing large supplementary datasets with a repository that charges for storage beyond a free tier (most institutional and disciplinary repositories relevant to research data management do not charge authors directly, but some do for very large deposits), and permission/licensing fees if the manuscript reproduces copyrighted figures or substantial text from another publisher’s work. The latter is typically handled through a rights-clearance service such as CCC’s RightsLink and is a cost separate from, and unrelated to, anything the publishing journal itself charges.
Putting it together: what to actually budget
There’s no single number, because the real total depends entirely on the route:
- Traditional subscription journal, no open-access election: often $0 in direct author-facing fees beyond possible page/color charges — the journal recovers costs from subscribers instead.
- Green open access (self-archiving a version in a repository): typically $0, since the fee structure of the journal of record is unchanged; the cost is only your time complying with embargo and version requirements.
- Gold open access: the APC dominates, commonly $1,000–$5,000+, plus any of the smaller costs above that apply to your specific manuscript.
- Diamond open access: no APC and no reader-facing paywall by design, funded instead by an institution, society, or consortium — the closest route to $0 total cost while still being open access.
- Hybrid open access: usually the highest APC tier of the options above, since the journal is pricing the open-access option against a subscription base it doesn’t want to cannibalize.
On top of whichever of those applies, budget separately for any English-language editing you need (a pre-submission cost, not tied to the journal at all) and check the specific journal’s author guidelines for page charges, color charges, and cover-image policy before assuming the quoted APC is the whole story.
Ways to reduce or avoid these costs
- Check for a fee waiver or institutional waiver programme. Many publishers waive or discount APCs for authors from lower-income-classified countries, and some extend discretionary waivers on a case-by-case basis — it’s always worth asking before assuming full price applies.
- Check whether your institution has a transformative agreement with the publisher. Many Read & Publish deals cover the APC in full or in part automatically, based on the corresponding author’s institutional affiliation, with no separate application required.
- Consider a diamond open access or reputable no-APC journal where the fit is genuine — not every field has strong diamond OA options yet, but where they exist and match the manuscript’s scope, they eliminate the largest cost entirely.
- Use green open access self-archiving alongside a subscription-journal submission if the funder mandate or personal goal is public accessibility rather than a gold-OA license specifically.
- Skip the genuinely optional line items — reprints and cover-image consideration are almost never required for the article to be published; treat them as discretionary spend, not part of the real cost of publishing.
Frequently asked questions
Is an APC the same as a submission fee?
No. A submission fee (where one exists) is charged simply to have a manuscript reviewed, regardless of outcome, and is uncommon outside a few disciplines and journal types. An APC is charged only on acceptance, only for open-access publication, and is far more widely used across the scholarly publishing industry. A journal can charge either, both, or neither.
Do I have to pay anything if my paper is rejected?
Only if the journal charges a submission fee, which is assessed regardless of outcome. APCs, page charges, and color charges are all acceptance-contingent — none of them apply to a rejected manuscript.
Why do some journals still charge for color figures if the article is online anyway?
The charge is historically tied to the cost of color printing for the physical/print edition, not the online version, which typically displays color figures at no extra cost. Whether a given journal still assesses this charge, and whether it’s waived once an article is otherwise open access, varies by publisher — check the specific journal’s author guidelines rather than assuming either way.
Are reprints worth buying?
For most authors, no — a PDF of the accepted or published version, or an open-access link, serves the same purpose for sharing and citation as a physical reprint. Reprints remain worth considering mainly where an institution, sponsor, or discipline-specific norm specifically calls for physical copies.
Can my funder or institution cover these costs?
Often, at least partly. Many funders explicitly permit APCs as an allowable grant cost (sometimes within a stated cap — see the NIH example above), and many institutional libraries maintain open-access funds or hold transformative agreements that cover some or all of the APC automatically. Submission fees, page/color charges, and language-editing costs are less consistently covered and should be checked against the specific funder’s or institution’s policy rather than assumed.
