PLOS Prices Its Journals in Tiers, From $1,088 to $6,460

PLOS is the one publisher in this set that puts exact figures on a single page, journal by journal and, within a journal, article type by article type. That makes it the easiest of the five to quote and the one where getting the detail right actually matters, because the figures inside one journal can differ by a factor of two.

Inside PLOS ONE alone: most research articles and Study Protocols are $2,477; a Registered Report Protocol is $1,852; a Registered Report Article is $1,088; a Lab Protocol is $1,536. The article type, not just the journal, decides the fee.

The discipline-specific journals — PLOS Climate, PLOS Global Public Health, PLOS Mental Health and PLOS Water — charge $2,596; PLOS Aging and Health, PLOS Complex Systems, PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Digital Health, PLOS Ecosystems and PLOS Genetics charge $3,165; PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases charges $2,670; PLOS Pathogens charges $3,165 for research articles and short reports.

The flagship selective journals use a different model. PLOS Biology, PLOS Medicine and PLOS Sustainability and Transformation run Community Action Publishing, a collective-funding model: the published figures — $5,500 (research article), $4,675 (discovery report), $3,150 (update article) for PLOS Biology; $6,460 for PLOS Medicine; $3,400 for PLOS Sustainability and Transformation — are non-member fees, charged only when the corresponding author’s institution has not joined that journal’s funding community. A member institution’s authors are not charged these amounts.

Equity provisions are built in by country group. Research4Life Group A institution authors with no external research funding publish free, across all PLOS journals. Group B institution authors publish free only in PLOS Biology, PLOS Medicine and PLOS Sustainability and Transformation; in every other journal, their fee is reduced to $940. Both must be requested at submission. A separate, case-by-case Publication Fee Assistance programme exists for authors who show financial need and have exhausted other funding, also requested at submission.

Pricing PLOS ONE by article type rather than by a flat per-journal number reflects real cost and risk differences: a Registered Report Article has already been peer-reviewed at the protocol stage, which is less production work than a full research article assessed from scratch, and the fee reflects that rather than charging the same amount regardless of format.

Community Action Publishing exists because a flat per-article fee on a highly selective flagship journal would have to be very high to cover the journal’s costs from the (relatively few) papers it accepts — which is exactly the $5,500–$6,460 range seen here. Spreading that cost across member institutions, rather than onto whichever individual author happens to get accepted, is the stated purpose of the model.

The Research4Life structure answers the predictable objection to any of this: that a fee schedule built around institutional funding capacity will exclude researchers who have neither. Tying the waiver to recognised income classifications, rather than to a case-by-case judgement for every applicant, is what makes the Group A/Group B provision function at scale, while Publication Fee Assistance remains for the cases that still fall through it.

How it reaches a specific journal. The Community Action Publishing journals publish their member-institution lists separately, so checking whether your own institution is a member is a different lookup from checking the fee schedule itself.

For every other PLOS journal, the fee schedule on the publication-fees page is the whole story: there is no separate members-only tier to check, only the Research4Life and Publication Fee Assistance routes described above.