Fig. 3.

Increase in research costs per published paper. The graph shows the increasing costs of research for two biological research areas, penicillin and CRISPR. Data on NIH awards and publications that acknowledge these grant awards were retrieved from the Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORT) (9). Research costs for all publications are plotted for each publication year. As can be seen, costs have gone up substantially over the recent years; costs for CRISPR have increased dramatically. Note that there is a delay between funding awarded in 2015 and publications being published that acknowledge this funding; for example, the 2015/2016 values will likely decrease as future publications acknowledge this past funding.