This article is part of the Library’s week-long Open Access Week 2025 series.
Research funding organizations, whether federal or private, play a crucial role in advancing life-changing research by awarding grants to researchers. A growing number of research funding bodies require grantees to publish the results of research funded by grants immediately and in open access. Additionally, many require the underlying data to be immediately publicly accessible. Funders are beginning to restrict funds from being applied towards publishing fees and, in some cases, not allowing them to be used for any portion of an Article Processing Charge (APC). This leaves researchers to navigate paying a fee that can be thousands of dollars.
Research Funder Open Access Policies Evolve
The United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) revised its Public Access Policy effective date to be July 1, 2025, instead of December 31, 2025. The most significant change to the policy requires NIH-supported researchers to submit their Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) to PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication. Researchers are not required to pay to publish, and embargoes (restricting access for a period of time) are not admissible under the policy.
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) recently announced that they have enacted an Immediate Access to Research Policy for its scientists, taking effect January 1, 2026. Any original, peer-reviewed research articles with a major contribution from an HHMI lab are required to be made freely and publicly accessible as preprints under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Public License.
The Gates Foundation has had an Open Access Policy for published research since 2015 but coming up on a year ago (effective January 1, 2025) expanded their requirements to include preprints and data. In addition, the foundation will not pay article processing charges.
Publication Costs and Policy Compliance
In a blog post titled, Guidance on the Revised NIH Public Access Policy Effective July 2025, the University of California Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) deftly outlined the NIH Public Access Policy updates and framed the issues many authors are grappling with when faced with conflicting funder and publisher policy requirements. These often confusing and potentially costly messages to authors could be replicated beyond U.S. federal funding scenarios as publishers seek to ensure authors pay for open access to any version of their manuscript.
The University of California is committed to making it easier and more affordable for UC authors to publish open access.
The UC Libraries negotiate agreements with scholarly journal publishers to reduce the amount authors must pay when they choose to publish open access. Most agreements offer up to full coverage of the open access fees; others offer a discount.
UC authors (all UC employees, including senate faculty, non-senate researchers, lecturers, post-doctoral scholars, administrative staff, librarians, and graduate students) benefit from participation in the UC Open Access Policies that ensure research articles authored at all 10 campuses of UC will be made available to the public at no charge once authors deposit them into eScholarship, UC’s open access repository. The UC open access (OA) policies reserve rights for UC faculty and other employees to make their articles freely available to the public in an open access repository. They do this by automatically granting a non-exclusive copyright license to the University before any later agreements authors may make with publishers. UC retains those rights regardless of what rights authors may subsequently transfer to publishers. The OA policies don’t specify where UC authors should publish or require them to pay open access fees to publishers to comply.
Talk to a librarian on your campus about how the OA publishing agreements or the UC OA policies can help you comply with funder public access policies and get the most reach for your research!
Make Informed Decisions About Where You Publish
UC San Diego authors can turn to us — the Library — for support in navigating publishing options and decisions, whether their research is funded or not.
Scholarly Communication Services supports researchers and scholars at UC San Diego from all backgrounds, disciplines, and at all career stages in generating and disseminating knowledge and creative works. Find help in navigating an increasingly expensive publishing landscape, publishing open access, raising the visibility of your research and communicating the increased impact, and protecting your rights as an author.
Research Data Curation Services assist with creating a data management plan, training on data management best practices, guidance on depositing your data in a repository, help creating a digital object identifier (DOI) for your research outputs, or instruction on research computing skills. More on how to publish your data.
The world of open access publishing is complex and constantly changing, but you don’t have to navigate it alone. UC San Diego Library’s Scholarly Communication and Research Data Curation teams can help you understand funder mandates, navigate publisher costs and policies, manage your research data, and make your work accessible to the widest possible audience.
Connect with us to explore your publishing options and ensure global access to your research.
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