Nature APC and Open Access: What It Costs, How to Get It Covered, and Whether It's Worth It

Here's what many early-career researchers don't realize: you don't have to pay anything to publish in Nature.

Nature is a hybrid journal. That means it operates two tracks:

1. Subscription track (default): Your article is published behind the paywall. Readers access it through their institution's library subscription. You pay $0.
2. Open access track (optional): Your article is immediately free for anyone to read. You (or your funder/institution) pay the APC.

If your funder doesn't require open access and your institution doesn't have a Read & Publish agreement, publishing through the subscription track is completely free. Your paper still appears in Nature with the same DOI, the same indexing, and the same editorial process. The only difference is access.

That said, the landscape is shifting. More funders now mandate open access, and more institutions have agreements that cover the cost. So the practical question isn't usually "should I pay $11,390?" but rather "is my institution already covering this?"

Springer Nature has negotiated Read & Publish (also called "transformative") agreements with over 1,000 institutions across countries. Under these deals, the institution pays a bundled annual fee that covers both journal subscriptions and APCs for their researchers.

If your institution has an active agreement, here's what happens:

1. Your paper gets accepted by Nature.
2. During the production process, you're asked whether you want open access.
3. The system detects your institutional affiliation.
4. The APC is automatically covered. You pay nothing.

Major agreements active in 2026 include:

The US situation is fragmented. Some universities (MIT, UC system, Stanford) have institutional agreements. Others don't. Check your library's open access page or ask your grants office before assuming you'll need to pay out of pocket.

One important detail: these agreements typically cover original research articles in the core Nature titles but exclude Nature Reviews journals. Nature Communications is fully open access with its own separate APC ($7,350) and isn't part of Read & Publish deals because it's already gold OA.

Springer Nature offers automatic and case-by-case APC support:

Automatic waivers:

• Corresponding authors in Research4Life Group A countries (low-income nations as classified by the World Bank) receive a full APC waiver.
• Authors in Group B countries (lower-middle-income) receive a 50% discount.

Case-by-case waivers:

• Authors who face genuine financial hardship can request a waiver at the time of acceptance.
• Approval isn't guaranteed and depends on circumstances.
• Springer Nature states that waiver requests don't affect editorial decisions, and editors don't see the waiver application.

Membership discounts:

• Some scientific society memberships or institutional affiliations provide small discounts (typically 5-15%), but these are rare for the flagship Nature title and more common for Springer-branded journals.

In practice, the waiver system works best for researchers in low-income countries. For mid-career researchers at well-funded Western institutions, the expectation is that your grant or institution covers the cost.

Nature's open access option satisfies all major public access mandates:

If your funder requires immediate open access (as Plan S does), you need to choose the gold OA option and pay the APC. If your funder allows a 6 or 12-month embargo, you can publish via the subscription track and deposit the accepted manuscript in a repository (like PubMed Central) after the embargo period.

Nature supports both CC BY and CC BY-NC licenses for open access articles. Plan S requires CC BY. If your funder is a cOAlition S member, make sure you select CC BY at the licensing stage.

Nature doesn't charge page fees, color figure fees, or overlength charges. The APC (if you choose OA) is the only publication fee.

However, there are adjacent costs that catch some authors off guard:

• Reprints: If you want physical reprints of your article, those are charged separately. Most researchers don't need these anymore, but some institutions still request them for promotion files.

• License choice: Choosing CC BY-NC instead of CC BY may not satisfy your funder's mandate. If you pick the wrong license and need to change it after publication, the process is slow and not guaranteed.

• Embargo deposits: If you publish via the subscription track and need to deposit in a repository after the embargo, you're responsible for uploading the accepted manuscript yourself. Nature doesn't do this automatically for all repositories.

• Supplementary data hosting: Large datasets linked to your paper may need to be deposited in external repositories (like Dryad or Figshare). These repositories are free for most data sizes, but extremely large datasets may incur storage fees.

If you've gotten your paper accepted at Nature, the APC decision comes down to three questions:

1. Does your funder require immediate open access? If yes, you need gold OA and the $11,390 APC. Check whether your institution's Read & Publish agreement covers it.
2. Does your institution have a Read & Publish deal with Springer Nature? If yes, the APC is covered automatically. Choose open access.
3. Neither applies? Publish via the subscription track for free. Your paper will still be in Nature. Deposit the accepted manuscript in a repository after the embargo if your funder requires eventual public access.

For most researchers at institutions with active agreements, the answer is simple: choose open access, the cost is covered, and your paper reaches the widest possible audience.

Before you reach the APC decision, though, the harder question is whether your manuscript is ready for Nature's editorial screen. If you want to check your paper's readiness before submitting, run a Nature desk-rejection readiness check to catch the issues that trigger desk rejection at this level.

In our pre-submission review work with manuscripts targeting Nature, we see three patterns where researchers lose money or time on the APC question before they've even passed the editorial screen.

Paying the APC before the paper is accepted. This doesn't happen literally, but researchers budget grant funds for the Nature APC and then submit a paper that isn't ready for this tier. The real cost isn't $11,390. It's the 6 months spent chasing a desk rejection at Nature when the paper would have been accepted at Nature Communications (APC $7,350) or Science Advances (~$5,500) in half the time.

Choosing the wrong license under funder pressure. We find that roughly one in five authors funded by Plan S agencies initially select CC BY-NC instead of CC BY. The error isn't caught until production, when Springer Nature flags the conflict. Fixing it after acceptance adds 2 to 4 weeks of delay and requires funder correspondence that could have been avoided by checking the mandate before submission.

Assuming institutional coverage without verifying. Researchers at US institutions are the most common group to discover mid-production that their university doesn't have a Read & Publish agreement with Springer Nature. The UC system and MIT do. Many R1 universities don't. Check your library's open access page before you submit, not after you celebrate the acceptance.

A Nature submission readiness check won't tell you which license to pick, but it will tell you whether your paper is ready for Nature's editorial screen before you commit to this APC tier.