Blood APC and Open Access: Page Charges, OA Fees, and Why Regular Article Authors Pay Something

Blood's $85/page charge applies to every accepted Regular Article and Brief Report. ASH's fee page does not tie it to your open access choice. If your Regular Article or Brief Report is accepted, you owe $85 per printed page.

Here's what a typical bill looks like:

The charge is calculated based on the final formatted/printed page count, not the manuscript page count. Your 25-page double-spaced manuscript might format down to 10 printed pages.

Some institutions cover page charges automatically through departmental funds. Others don't. If you're submitting to Blood for the first time, check with your department's grants office to see how they handle it. Getting a surprise $1,000 invoice after your paper is accepted is not a great experience.

Blood's OA license is CC BY-NC-ND by default. This is more restrictive than what most OA advocates prefer:

• CC BY-NC-ND: Others can share your work but can't modify it or use it commercially. This is the most restrictive Creative Commons license.

• CC BY: Others can share, modify, and use your work commercially with attribution. This is what Plan S requires.

The CC BY-NC-ND default matters because it doesn't satisfy Plan S requirements. If your funder is a cOAlition S member, ASH says authors whose institutions or funders require publication under a CC BY license may request one. This is a real friction point for European-funded hematology researchers.

Blood makes OA articles freely available immediately upon publication. Subscription-track articles are available to subscribers, ASH members, readers in select low-income countries, and patient groups.

ASH launched Blood Advances in 2017 as a fully gold open access companion to Blood. It's worth considering as an alternative:

Blood Advances has grown quickly. It publishes more articles per year than the flagship and covers the full scope of hematology. The JIF gap is significant (~23.9 vs ~7.4), but Blood Advances is competitive with journals like Leukemia (IF ~8.8) and Haematologica (IF ~8.2).

If your funder requires CC BY licensing, you can request it at Blood. If you don't want to pay $5,850 plus page charges at Blood, Blood Advances is an alternative within the ASH family. The trade-off is JIF and prestige.

ASH's Publication Fees page for Blood lists the submission fee, the public access fee, page charges, color charges and offprints. It does not describe a waiver or discount program, and we could not find one on ASH's Blood author pages. It does say that your publication choice (public access or subscription) has no effect on the peer review process or acceptance of your submission.

Fee questions:

• Contact the Blood editorial office at editorial@hematology.org or use the Elsevier Support Center linked from the Publication Fees page.

• Ask your institution whether it covers page charges from departmental funds. That is a local arrangement, not a publisher program.

The Plan S situation is the biggest compliance headache for Blood. If you're funded by a cOAlition S member, don't assume that paying $5,850 for OA automatically satisfies your mandate. The license type matters as much as the access. Check with your funder's open access policy office before committing.

For NIH-funded researchers, the simplest route is the subscription track plus PMC deposit. For NIH-funded Blood articles where no public access fee has been paid, ASH deposits the article in PubMed Central with a 12-month embargo. You'll still pay page charges, but you won't owe the $5,850 OA fee.

• Page charges apply once a Regular Article or Brief Report is accepted. You can't decline them without withdrawing your paper. Budget for $500-$1,200 depending on article length.

• The OA license is restrictive. CC BY-NC-ND prevents others from creating derivatives of your work. This matters for meta-analyses and systematic reviews that want to reproduce your figures.

• Supplementary data carries a fee. ASH charges a $105 publication fee for each standard data supplement accompanying an accepted paper, plus another $105 for any supplement over 5 MB. The fee is waived for Review Articles, How I Treat articles and Perspectives.

• Color figures are free but must meet Blood's strict formatting requirements. Expect at least one round of figure revision during production.

• Reprints cost extra. ASH charges for physical reprints. Most researchers don't need them, but check with your department.

Blood's fee structure creates a clear decision tree:

1. Every author of an accepted Regular Article or Brief Report pays page charges. Budget $500-$1,200, plus the $75 submission fee.

1. Need immediate OA? Add $5,850 (full article) or $2,925 (Brief Report). Confirm the license type satisfies your funder.

1. NIH-funded with no immediate OA mandate? Publish via subscription. Skip the public access fee. ASH deposits in PMC with a 12-month embargo.

1. Plan S funder? Request a CC BY license from Blood, which ASH allows when an institution or funder requires it, or consider Blood Advances.

1. Cost-sensitive? Haematologica or JCI offer lower total costs with no page charges.

Blood remains the top destination for hematology research, and its JIF reflects that. The page charge system is an annoyance, not a barrier. Most labs budget for it as a routine cost of doing business in the ASH ecosystem.

The harder challenge is getting accepted. ASH's Peer Review page says most articles are rejected on grounds of insufficient priority or lack of relevance to hematology, not data quality or technical issues. If you're preparing a submission, Blood submission readiness check to identify the structural issues that trigger early rejection at Blood's level.

For current fee schedules and submission guidelines, check Blood's official publication fees page.

Method note: this page was reviewed against ASH/Blood author instructions, open-access fee pages, JCR context, waiver language, and Manusights hematology submission-screening patterns. We checked the APC and page-charge choice separately from journal fit because cost, access route, and citation metrics do not change the manuscript evidence an editor sees.

In our pre-submission review work, the specific risk pattern was treating a fee, JIF, or unofficial rate as the submission decision. The editorial triage pattern is stricter in practice: editors actually screen for scope, evidence strength, and audience fit before cost or citation metrics matter.

Use this year-over-year checklist before citing numbers from Blood in a grant, CV, or submission memo. It is a verification aid, not a claim that every older value is stable.

Do not use one number as the whole Blood decision. Check CiteScore, SJR, H-index, article type, publication volume, and the journal's real audience before treating the fee, acceptance rate, or JIF as decisive.

In our review work, the common mistake is using a metric to justify a weak fit. A stronger submission decision asks whether the manuscript would still look native to the journal if the headline number disappeared.

Worth paying if:

• Your funder mandates open access (check Plan S / cOAlition S requirements)

• An institutional Read & Publish agreement covers the fee

• Open access visibility meaningfully benefits your research area

• The APC fits within your grant budget

Consider alternatives if:

• The APC is a personal out-of-pocket expense

• A subscription option or green OA (preprint + embargo) satisfies your funder

• Another OA journal with a lower APC would provide similar visibility

For a manuscript-specific signal before you submit, run a Blood submission readiness check.

Or see example reports before you finalize.