The American Psychological Association appears to be retreating from a new policy on open-access archiving that drew sharp criticism after it was described on Tuesday by The Chronicle.

On this News Blog and elsewhere online critics said the association’s plan to charge authors $2,500 each to post their published articles on a free online database was, at best, “regressive” and, at worst, the work of “cash-flow hounds” in the group’s “money-making machine.” (At least one prominent open-access advocate defended the policy.)

Today the policy that was posted online yesterday has been replaced with a statement that the policy is being “re-examined.”

Yesterday the same link went to a statement saying that the psychological association would charge $2,500 to authors who must archive in PubMed Central, the repository of papers published by researchers with grants from the National Institutes of Health, and would archive their manuscripts for them. —Lila Guterman

Update, 4:45 p.m.: Rhea Farberman, the association’s director of communications, told The Chronicle that the group was considering the fee to recoup licensing and subscription revenue lost because of open access. Thanks to open access, she said, “all publishers are forced to look at how to cover the costs of such things as peer review and publishing, editorial work, production work, paper, ink, all those things.”