In November 2025, a young faculty member at Sun Yat-sen University received an acceptance letter from Nature Communications for a paper on new solid-state electrolytes for sodium-ion batteries. Instead of celebrating, he immediately opened his budget ledger: the USD $6,990 Article Processing Charge (APC) would have to be drawn from his group’s National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) grant. This fee, about 50,000 RMB, equals his lab’s combined electricity, water, and student stipend costs for half a year. His experience is far from isolated. In the first half of 2025, Nature Communications published around 5,400 papers, about 2,100 of them from Chinese authors—roughly 39%, the highest share globally. Based on standard pricing, Chinese research funding contributed a rough estimate of USD $14.7 million to this journal in six months—equivalent to the cost of two medium-sized scientific research vessels. This is just the tip of the iceberg of China’s spending in the global Open Access publishing system, revealing the deep entanglement between academic output and economic expenditure.
Academic GDP: The Forced Pursuit of High-Level Papers Perfectly Aligns with Open Access
In Chinese universities and institutes, promotion, postdoc completion, early-career grants, and prestigious titles like Changjiang Scholar or National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars all depend on “high-level papers.” Evaluation standards point directly to the impact factors of international journals, forming a hidden system of “academic GDP” competition. Every NSFC grant, national key R&D plan, or provincial fund is rigorously assessed upon completion by the number and quality of “representative publications.” Without enough international high-impact papers, future funding becomes nearly impossible.
A closed loop forms: funding supports experiments → experiments produce papers → papers secure more funding. In this high-pressure environment, the USD $6,990 APC is no longer viewed as an extra burden but simply another line item in the project budget, as reasonable as buying reagents or paying utilities.
Nature Communications fits this demand perfectly: its impact factor remains in the 14–18 range—not as unattainable as Nature or Science, yet prestigious enough to brighten a CV; review takes only 3–5 months, faster than top-tier flagship journals; and crucially, as fully Open Access, articles are freely readable worldwide, boosting visibility and citations. Chinese researchers flock to it, driving their proportion of authors steadily upward. Many researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and major “985” universities say this choice is not merely strategic but necessary for survival, since local evaluation systems treat international publication as a hard indicator while neglecting domestic journals.
Open Access Dominance in STEM and Its Precise Match with Chinese Authors
The explosive growth of Open Access journals has concentrated in physics, chemistry, materials science, engineering, geoscience, and preclinical medicine—fields where China invests most heavily and outputs most strongly. Of the world’s top 20 Open Access journals by publication volume in 2024, 18 were STEM-focused, with Nature Communications near the top. Data from 2025 shows the gap widening: Chinese authors account for more than 30% in many of these journals.
This is no accident but a perfect supply-and-demand match: Chinese STEM researchers need high-impact publication outlets, while major Open Access journals need a steady cash flow. By contrast, universities in Europe and North America typically rely on such transformative agreements as Read-and-Publish, which bundle APCs into institutional deals, leaving authors nearly cost-free. China’s entities have not yet established a equivalent, so APCs are mostly paid directly by individual research groups.
The result: China has become the world’s largest “retail buyer.” Reports estimate that in 2024, Chinese authors paid over USD $1.2 billion in APCs—28–30% of the global Open Access market—most flowing to publishing giants like Springer Nature, Elsevier, Wiley, and ACS. These funds not only sustain operations but boost profits. Springer Nature’s 2024 financial report shows that Open Access accounts for 62% of total revenue with a 68% gross profit margin. While Chinese scholars sprint for “academic GDP,” international publishing giants profit handsomely, creating an asymmetric academic economy.
Funding Sources, Researcher Pressure, and the Invisible Bill
Although APCs appear to be paid by labs, the money ultimately comes from taxpayers. In a typical NSFC general program (600,000–800,000 RMB over four years), less than half may go to reagents and instruments—the rest is divided among rent, utilities, travel, publication fees, and labor costs. The USD $6,990 APC can swallow 5–10% of the budget. For large national key R&D projects that require 20–30 Nature Communications-level papers at completion, publication costs alone can exceed 5 million RMB—all from public funding.
For frontline researchers, this hidden bill intensifies occupational pressure. Many young faculty jokingly call APCs a “tax on intelligence” or “academic protection fee,” but no one dares refuse: refusal could mean career collapse. A chemical engineering associate professor at a northwestern “211” university lamented: “Publishing one Nature Communications paper costs the same as my wife’s annual salary. Our child just started kindergarten—this pressure is far beyond academia.” A postdoc in a materials science department at an eastern “985” university revealed: “Our group published three last year. The first felt exciting; the next two were just paying off debts. With a monthly salary of 12,000 RMB, I constantly worry about the budget.”
Such comments are everywhere in internal academic chats, exposing a deeper problem: high APCs shrink experimental capacity and worsen inequality—especially affecting inland universities and early-career scholars.
Global Fairness, Quality Concerns, and Paths Toward Reform
The high cost of Open Access publishing has sparked widespread debate. Chinese scholars often warn of capital outflow and reduced academic autonomy. Academician Wang Yifang of CAS argues that while Open Access promotes knowledge sharing, it is a “double-edged sword” for China. He urges national-level transformative agreements to lower costs through collective negotiation and increased investment in domestic Open Access platforms to achieve “knowledge reflow.”
Other experts call for reforming evaluation systems to reduce overreliance on international journals and “write papers on China’s soil.” But these efforts face major obstacles: the number of domestic journals remains small, their average impact factor lags below 5, and many struggle with nepotism and opaque review processes, damaging academic credibility.
International scholars focus more on quality control and global equity. Sarah Thomas, former Harvard library director, notes that while Open Access accelerates knowledge flow, publishers may shift costs and tighten gatekeeping; she advocates tiered pricing based on national income and global funds to support researchers in developing countries. Martin Weller of the UK Open University criticizes the model for deepening “publication poverty,” promoting “Diamond Open Access” as an alternative—funded by institutions or governments, with no fees for authors. He suggests China could learn from the EU’s Plan S to build strong mandatory Open Access policies and enhance international collaboration.
Surveys show more than half of authors worry Open Access will trigger “a flood of non-peer-reviewed content” and intensify inequality—wealthy institutions opt for high-fee journals while poorer ones are pushed to low-end outlets. Stanford economist Paul David argues that such misaligned incentives impede innovation and widen global knowledge gaps; he recommends AI-assisted peer review to cut costs while maintaining quality.
Across viewpoints, a consensus emerges: real reform demands joint effort—evaluation reform, fee negotiation, investment in domestic platforms, and stronger global quality safeguards—to ensure Open Access serves scientific progress rather than commercial interests.