How much does it cost to publish in a biomedical journal?
We hold published fees for 4,496 biomedical journals. The median is $3,140 — but a quarter charge under $2,160, and 1,290 charge nothing at all.
Published 21 August 2026
Ask a publisher what it costs to publish and you get one number. Ask the whole field and you get a distribution — and the distribution is far more useful, because it tells you whether the quote in front of you is normal.
We hold a published article processing charge (APC) for 4,496 of the 11,447 biomedical journals we track. Here is what that data says.
The headline numbers
| Charge | |
|---|---|
| Cheapest | $7 |
| 10th percentile | $790 |
| 25th percentile | $2,160 |
| Median | $3,140 |
| 75th percentile | $3,970 |
| 90th percentile | $4,590 |
| Most expensive | $12,690 |
Notice how flat the middle is: from the 25th to the 75th percentile the range is only $2,160 to $3,970. Most of the market clusters in a narrow band, and the extremes at both ends are unusual.
Where journals actually sit
| Charge | Journals | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Under $500 | 346 | 7.7% |
| $500–999 | 173 | 3.8% |
| $1,000–1,999 | 462 | 10.3% |
| $2,000–2,999 | 1,050 | 23.4% |
| $3,000–3,999 | 1,411 | 31.4% |
| $4,000–4,999 | 828 | 18.4% |
| $5,000 and above | 226 | 5.0% |
Nearly a third sit in the $3,000–3,999 band. That is the centre of gravity of biomedical open-access publishing.
The bottom tail matters too. 346 journals charge under $500, and they are not all obscure — the band includes society journals subsidised by membership fees and journals from national research bodies.
It varies more by publisher than by quality
| Publisher | Median charge | Journals |
|---|---|---|
| Nature Portfolio | $6,990 | 33 |
| Adis / Springer Healthcare | $5,090 | 29 |
| SAGE Publishing | $3,900 | 301 |
| Springer Science+Business Media | $3,890 | 542 |
| Wiley | $3,880 | 530 |
| Oxford University Press | $3,850 | 156 |
| Springer Nature | $3,590 | 118 |
| Cambridge University Press | $3,550 | 39 |
| Elsevier | $3,170 | 1,297 |
| Frontiers Media | $3,077 | 70 |
| BioMed Central | $2,990 | 219 |
| Dove Medical Press | $2,320 | 60 |
Nature Portfolio’s median is more than double Elsevier’s. That gap is about brand positioning and rejection rates, not the cost of running peer review — handling a manuscript does not differ by a factor of two between these publishers.
Three things that change what you actually pay
Your institution may already have an agreement. Large publishers hold read-and-publish deals with thousands of universities, under which your APC is covered or discounted to zero. This is the biggest lever and the most commonly missed. Ask your librarian before you pay anything — not after.
Waivers are far more common than researchers assume. Of the DOAJ-listed journals that do charge a fee, 78% state they will waive it. That is the majority position, not a fringe option. How to actually get one.
A large part of the field charges nothing. 1,290 journals in our data record no publication charge, and some are highly cited. See which ones.
What the charge does not tell you
A high APC is not a quality signal. It reflects a publisher’s costs, its rejection rate and what the market will bear. A low one is not a warning sign either — it usually means a society or university is absorbing the cost.
What matters is whether the journal is indexed where your field looks, whether it reviews properly, and whether your paper is in scope. The fee is a constraint to work within, not a measure of anything.