China will no longer pay APC fees for Nature Communications, Science Advances, Cell Reports, Results in Physics, and Advanced Science starting March 1, 2026 as reported by multiple users on the Chinese social media platform Little Red Book from February 14, 2026. It appears that the Chinese government is tired of paying the ridiculously high APC fees for these types of "Your paper was rejected, but you are welcome to transfer it to an Open Access, high-APC journal" papers. On January 1, 2026, Nature Communications raised its APC from USD $6,990 to $7,350 per paper. Yep, that's a lot of money for an online PDF. There is still incredible pressure to publish papers in top tier journals to survive in China (academic jobs and promotions), and Nature Communications and Science Advances are still listed as top tier by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, but if that "top tier" classification ever goes away, Chinese submissions for these journals will dry up. In theory, APCs are good, because they enable open access so that anyone can read research papers and global research can build off prior work and improve the world. But in practice, it seems that journals can't help but increase APC fees nonstop. Remember, most universities are non-profit, but most journals are for-profit.
In a distance past in which your research was more important than where it was published, many people published their papers in journals owned by their own countries. It was a matter of national interest to strengthen a country's publishing industry (and treat it like any other industry). Nowadays everyone knows very well that the academic publishing industry is an abomination controlled by profit-driven companies with immense earnings. And the proportion of Chinese publications in some journals, including several super-high impact ones, went from negligible to 50% or more in the past 20 years. If China decided to start its own version of Nature and pay researchers to publish there (like it already does with western high-impact journals), the status quo of academic publishing would take a massive hit. In the end, journals need authors a lot more than authors need journals, even though this is hard to remember given the metrics-driven and competition-dense reality of current academia...
Dr Tom Moir
1w
Apart from the web page fees, what are they actually paying for? Reviewers dont get paid.
APC fees look like high. Article processing can be cheaper, but e-archiving is problematic. Before digitalisation and still each university holds a massive archive. Here gouvernement should intervene in estabilishing a centralized e-library. In parallel, others problems have to be rediscussed, who is the owner of the content, a dilema between scientific authorship input and publisher "fashioned-product"..
The Internet is free. You don't need to pay 8K to place something on the Internet. ArXiV is free as well.
Good for China. But now those journals will increase the APC even higher if the submissions from China drop significantly. Their business model is likely based on the total number of accepted papers, so if that total number drops, the APC will have to be increased (my assumption).
WU Guangheng
1w
It is a fake news, we notice no such a policy in China until the very recently.
If there were government funded journals, that where able to be established with full transparency, to at least try to remove political influence on what is and isn't published - Would that ever be a reasonable approach? It seems like so much funding in government based, why is it that the global science community relies on for profit journals? This is asked in complete ignorance of the system, having only been a student so far and not having had anything even near the realm of work that could be published.
"APCs are good" said no scientist ever. It's just a twisted way to deviate public funding away from those that need it into private companies. Especially in an age where nothing is REALLY printed anymore, such fees are bonkers. Pay editors and reviews, then we can talk about a mild APC or OA charge.
Well, there are journals run by learned societies. If all scientists would just agree on submitting their work to these instead of to the for-profit publishing houses, the situation would be much better for everybody in science. Anything beyond an APC of 1500 US-$ is profit.
Good leadership China! The Open Access model (where researchers PAY to publish and review for FREE while publishers CHARGE for access) is the worse deal that has ever been shoved down our throats. This model was forced upon us as a "taxpayer's right" by the publishing industry lobby in Congress -- Congress was duped because there is already ANOTHER, parallel system (mandated by them!) to make sure that every manuscript is archived in a public repository. Taxpayers are paying DOUBLE: for our publication fees and for the public repository, and that's why the publishing business is booming! The SOLUTION? Go back to the Closed Access model, where APC = $0 and publishers charge for access as it used to be -- and only the good journals will survive!