There are about 350 journals that have worked out an agreement with NIH and PubMed Central (PMC) to deposit NIH-funded publications to PMC on behalf of NIH-funded authors. According to NIH, no further action is required by authors who publish in one of these journals in order to comply with the NIH Public Access Policy except to cite the PMCID in future NIH proposals, applications and progress reports as of 25 May 2008.

However, there are three journals on this list that charge authors for an “uploading fee” if they are not members of The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), the society that publishes these journals. The three journals are:

Journal of Biological Chemistry

Journal of Lipid Research

Molecular and Cellular Proteomics: MCP

There is no fee for ASBMB members but if you are a non-member and publish in one of these journals, the fee is $50.00. According to ASBMB:

“This service will be free for ASBMB members and will cost $50 for non-members. The $50 fee covers the cost to the publisher to tag and upload high resolution figures and supply supplemental data from our vendors to PubMed Central.” http://www.jbc.org/misc/Publishing_Options.shtml 

There may be more journals on the NIH list of journals that charge an upload fee. Please submit a comment if you know of other journals that do.