The NIH Zero-Embargo Mandate: A Compliance Guide for Medical Authors in 2026

In June 2026, a STAT News story captured a situation that more and more NIH-funded researchers are experiencing: a team that published in Nature Medicine in 2025 at no cost to the authors found that the same publication in 2026 now carries a $12,850 article processing charge. Nothing changed about their science. What changed was the NIH Public Access Policy.

On July 1, 2025, the revised NIH 2024 Public Access Policy took effect. The centerpiece of the change was simple and consequential: the 12-month embargo that previously let subscription journals sit on NIH-funded research before releasing it to the public was eliminated. From that date forward, manuscripts accepted for publication in journals by NIH-funded authors must be freely available in PubMed Central immediately at the time of publication. No waiting period. No exceptions.

A year into this policy, the compliance picture is messier than NIH anticipated. Major publishers including Springer Nature, Elsevier, and Wiley have responded by effectively requiring NIH-funded authors to pay substantial APCs if they want to publish in their subscription journals and still meet the NIH mandate. Some institutions have partial coverage through read-and-publish agreements. Many authors have no coverage at all. And NIH, which issued a formal request for information on allowable publication costs in July 2025, has not yet published a final rule on APC caps.

If you carry NIH funding on an active grant and are preparing a manuscript right now, the compliance question is not abstract. The decisions you make at the journal selection stage will determine whether you owe thousands of dollars, whether your institution can cover the bill, or whether you can publish in your target journal at all under your current budget.

What the 2024 NIH Policy Actually Changed

The original NIH Public Access Policy, introduced in 2008, required investigators funded by NIH to submit final peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication. The requirement came with a concession to publishers: journals could embargo the PMC release for up to 12 months after publication. That embargo gave subscription journals time to recover revenue from subscribers before the paper became freely available, and most major biomedical publishers participated in arrangements that honored both the PMC deposit and the delay.

The 2022 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memo changed the calculus. The OSTP memo directed all federal agencies to update their public access policies to eliminate the 12-month embargo entirely, effective no later than December 31, 2025. NIH moved first among the major research funders, publishing its revised policy in December 2024 and setting July 1, 2025 as the effective date for new manuscript acceptances. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute followed with a similar zero-embargo requirement, also effective January 2026, adding the further wrinkle that HHMI grantees must post a preprint before their first journal submission.

What this means in practice is that the accommodating arrangement journals had with the old NIH policy no longer works. A journal cannot satisfy the mandate by promising to release your paper to PMC after a 12-month hold. The paper has to be there, freely available, the day it publishes. That requires either a different technical arrangement with the publisher or, in most cases at major publishers, a payment.

Who the Policy Applies To

The NIH Public Access Policy applies to all investigators, co-investigators, and other key personnel whose work is supported in whole or in part by any NIH grant, cooperative agreement, contract, or intramural research program. It applies regardless of whether NIH funding was used to directly support the activities described in the paper. If an author on the manuscript holds an active NIH award and the research relates to that award, the policy applies.

The trigger point is acceptance, not publication. A manuscript accepted for publication on or after July 1, 2025 falls under the zero-embargo requirement, even if the authors started the research before that date and even if acceptance came on July 1 itself. The effective date is crisp and the cutoff is the formal acceptance letter from the journal editor, not the online publication date.

Authors with multiple funding sources should also note that the OSTP mandate is being implemented across all major US federal agencies, not only NIH. The National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy Office of Science, the Department of Defense, and others are updating their policies to meet the OSTP guidance by December 2026. If you hold NSF or DOD funding alongside NIH, check the current status of your specific agency's policy, because some are behind NIH's timeline and others have caught up.

How PubMed Central Deposit Actually Works

The NIH Manuscript Submission System, available at nihms.nih.gov, is the portal through which authors deposit manuscripts into PubMed Central. The system has been the route for NIH compliance since 2008, and the core mechanics have not changed with the new policy. What has changed is the timing requirement and the relationship with publisher workflows.

The deposit must be the Author Accepted Manuscript, which is the final peer-reviewed version of the paper as accepted by the journal, including all revisions made through the review process. It is not the pre-submission preprint. It is also not the published PDF, the version of record with journal formatting, DOI banner, and page numbers. The Author Accepted Manuscript is essentially the final Word or LaTeX file the authors produced after the last round of revisions, before the publisher applied typesetting and layout. This distinction matters because some authors mistakenly try to deposit the wrong version.

The NIHMS deposit process involves several steps. After logging into the system, the corresponding author submits article information (which can be pulled from PubMed or via DOI), identifies the NIH funding mechanisms that supported the work, and uploads the manuscript files. NIHMS then converts the files into a PubMed Central-ready format, a process that typically takes two to three weeks. After conversion, the author must log back in to review and approve the converted document before the PMCID is assigned. The PMCID is the compliance identifier that NIH checks against progress reports and renewal applications.

One practical problem: the two-to-three-week conversion window means that if you submit the AAM to NIHMS at the moment of acceptance, the PMCID may not be assigned until after the paper has already published. NIH accepts this timing gap as long as the deposit was initiated promptly at acceptance. What it does not accept is depositing weeks or months after publication.

The Publisher Compliance Problem

Here is the part of the policy that has surprised the most authors. Under the 2008 NIH policy, a large number of journals participated in formal arrangements under which the publisher deposited manuscripts in PMC on behalf of authors and applied the agreed embargo period. This made compliance largely invisible to authors at many journals. You submitted your paper, it was accepted, and the publisher handled the rest.

That arrangement is no longer available at the zero-embargo standard. When journals participated in the old system, they were depositing manuscripts with a delay that allowed their subscription revenue to continue as normal. Depositing with no delay means the paper is available free on the day it publishes, which means a subscriber who searches for that paper the week it comes out can read it for free in PMC rather than through the journal website. Major publishers are not willing to operate that way without charging something in exchange.

Springer Nature, Elsevier, and Wiley have all adopted a similar response to the NIH zero-embargo rule: NIH-funded authors who want to publish in their subscription journals now must choose the Gold Open Access route, paying the full article processing charge, to remain compliant with the NIH mandate. Some of these publishers have made public statements indicating they will not facilitate AAM deposits without embargo on the subscription route. This is not a technical limitation; it is a deliberate business decision.

A smaller number of publishers have taken the opposite position, allowing authors to self-deposit the AAM in NIHMS without an embargo even when the journal article remains behind a paywall. The American College of Physicians (publisher of Annals of Internal Medicine), Oxford University Press, and several society publishers have maintained or created arrangements compatible with the NIH mandate without requiring an APC. The landscape is genuinely mixed, which is why checking your target journal's specific policy before you commit to a submission is no longer optional.

What the Major Publishers Are Charging

The APC figures at flagship biomedical journals have generated considerable comment since the new NIH policy took effect. Nature Medicine charges $12,850 (approximately £9,390 or €10,850) for Gold Open Access publication. For NIH-funded authors at institutions without an offsetting agreement, this charge is now a condition of compliance, not a discretionary upgrade. The Lancet, published by Elsevier, charges approximately $9,550 for its Gold OA option. Wiley's Cancer journal sits at approximately $4,840 for the same route.

These numbers sit well above the average APC globally. NIH's own request for information, issued in July 2025, cited a global average APC of $1,235.51 and an average APC for US-published journals of approximately $2,177. The gap between those averages and the flagship journal rates is large enough that even a generous APC cap would exclude many researchers from their target journals unless institutional arrangements fill the difference.

Authors at institutions in low- and lower-middle-income countries can in many cases obtain full or partial fee waivers from Springer Nature journals under the publisher's portfolio-wide support framework. This is worth confirming directly with the editorial office if you are in one of the qualifying countries. For researchers at US academic medical centers, no such automatic waiver exists, and the APC falls either to the institution, to the grant budget if NIH allows it, or to the authors personally.

Institutional Agreements and Who Has Coverage

Many US academic institutions have signed read-and-publish agreements with Springer Nature, Wiley, and a smaller number of other publishers. These agreements bundle journal access subscriptions with open access publishing rights, so that corresponding authors affiliated with the participating institution can publish open access without paying an APC directly. The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) consortium negotiated agreements with Springer Nature and Wiley that run through December 2026, and similar arrangements exist through consortia at individual institutions.

The catch is that these agreements are capped by annual volume. Each participating institution has a maximum number of articles that can be published open access under the arrangement in a given year. At several universities, the 2026 cap for Springer Nature and Wiley is expected to be exhausted before December, which means corresponding authors submitting papers late in the year may find the coverage is no longer available even if their institution technically has an agreement in place.

If you are planning a submission to a journal covered by one of these arrangements, check with your institution's library or research office now rather than at the time of acceptance. The library is typically the place that tracks how many waiver slots remain for the year. Discovering that your institution's Springer Nature agreement is exhausted on the day your paper is accepted is a poor time to start researching alternatives.

Researchers at community medical centers, hospitals, and clinics that are not affiliated with a research university are unlikely to have access to these arrangements at all. If you conduct NIH-funded clinical research outside an academic medical center context, you should assume that APC costs will be a direct out-of-pocket expense and plan for them accordingly in your grant budget. NIH explicitly allows publication costs as allowable direct costs on grants, though proposed caps on what it will fund are still under development.

NIH's Response: APC Caps and What Has Been Proposed

NIH did not anticipate that major publishers would respond to the zero-embargo mandate by conditioning compliance on full Gold OA publication. On July 8, 2025, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya issued a statement acknowledging that publishers were not willing to allow AAM deposit without embargo unless authors paid APCs, and announcing that NIH intended to establish limits on how much grant money could be spent on publication costs.

On July 30, 2025, NIH published a formal Request for Information, NOT-OD-25-138, titled "Request for Information on Maximizing Research Funds by Limiting Allowable Publishing Costs." The RFI outlined five possible approaches. The lowest proposed cap was $2,000 per publication. A second option raised the cap to $3,000 for journals that both pay peer reviewers and make their reviews publicly available. A third approach set a cap at 0.8% of a research grant's direct costs or $20,000 over the length of the award, with a per-paper limit of $6,000. The public comment period closed September 15, 2025.

As of July 2026, NIH has not published a final rule specifying which of the five options was adopted or whether a modified version is in preparation. Authors should not treat the $2,000 or $6,000 figures as settled policy. They represent what NIH proposed, not what it has implemented. The uncertainty itself is a planning problem: if you budget for publication costs in a new grant application, you are guessing at a number that NIH may later cap lower than what the target journal charges.

The Trump administration's FY2026 budget proposal added a separate wrinkle by including language that would prohibit the use of federal funds for "expensive subscriptions to academic journals and prohibitively high publishing costs" unless required by statute or approved in advance by a federal agency. The proposal did not define "expensive" or "prohibitively high," and it remains a proposal rather than enacted policy. But it signals continued executive branch attention to APC costs and suggests further movement on publication cost caps is likely, even if the timeline and specific numbers remain unclear.

Common Compliance Mistakes to Avoid

Most compliance failures under the new policy stem from three misunderstandings, not from intentional non-compliance. The first is assuming that the publisher will handle the PMC deposit on the author's behalf, as many did under the old policy. Under the old policy, publishers with formal NIH arrangements did deposit manuscripts automatically. Under the new policy, at journals where self-deposit is the required route, this will not happen. If you receive an acceptance letter and do not initiate a NIHMS submission, nothing is submitted.

The second common mistake is uploading the published PDF to NIHMS rather than the Author Accepted Manuscript. This is both technically incorrect and, in most cases, a copyright violation. The AAM is the version you own as an author; the typeset version belongs to the publisher. If you try to upload the published PDF, NIHMS may reject it or assign a PMCID that later causes problems if the journal raises a copyright objection.

The third mistake is setting an embargo period in NIHMS when the policy no longer allows one. The NIHMS system still offers an embargo option because some manuscripts from before July 1, 2025 remain in the pipeline. If your paper was accepted on or after July 1, 2025, leave the embargo field empty or explicitly select "no embargo." A PMCID with an active embargo will show as non-compliant in NIH's reporting systems.

What Non-Compliance Looks Like in Practice

NIH checks public access compliance at two points: when investigators submit progress reports and when they apply for grant renewals. A paper that appears in a progress report without a PMCID, or with a PMCID that carries an active embargo, will be flagged as non-compliant. The immediate consequence is typically a hold on future funding for the affected grant until compliance is resolved. For investigators who have submitted to the wrong journal without knowing the APC cost, resolving this after the fact may require either paying the APC retroactively (if the publisher allows it), working with the journal to find an alternative deposit path, or disputing the compliance check with the NIH program office.

In most cases, NIH gives investigators an opportunity to come into compliance before imposing a funding hold. But the process requires communication with both NIH staff and the publisher, and it typically cannot be resolved in a day. Starting a grant renewal or progress report cycle and discovering that three papers are non-compliant is a problem worth avoiding. Building the NIHMS deposit step into your post-acceptance workflow as a fixed routine eliminates most of the risk.

A Practical Note on Journal Selection

The NIH compliance picture has effectively made journal selection a two-criteria problem for NIH-funded researchers. The first criterion is the scientific one you have always applied: fit, audience, impact, scope. The second criterion is now financial: does this journal offer a compliance path under the NIH zero-embargo policy that your budget can support?

For many clinical and translational researchers, this means giving more serious consideration to society journals and open-access-first titles that set APCs at levels well below the flagship journal benchmark. PLOS Medicine, PLOS ONE, BMC Medicine, and the JAMA Open Network suite, among others, have APCs that fall within ranges that NIH grants can accommodate even under the most restrictive of the proposed caps. Publishing in one of these venues does not necessarily mean reaching a smaller audience in clinical fields. Some high-quality medical research that would previously have aimed at a subscription flagship may be better served by a well-indexed open access journal where it is immediately readable by the community it is meant to inform.

The researchers who will be most constrained are those whose target journals are controlled by the three major commercial publishers (Springer Nature, Elsevier, Wiley) and whose institutions have no offsetting agreements, or whose institutional waiver pools run out before their papers are accepted. For those authors, the honest planning step is to build the APC into the grant budget from the start, have a conversation with a program officer about allowable costs, and identify one or two alternative target journals where the compliance cost is lower if the preferred venue becomes financially impossible.

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