[TopQuark]

The group wants to compete with established journals while slimming publishing costs and shortening peer-review cycles.

They only changed the pocket from which the money comes from: instead of the readers, the authors pay. This does not affect the costs, whether monetary or turnaround time.

A statement on the site says the Web makes it possible "to make our treasury of scientific information available to a much wider audience, including millions of students, teachers, physicians, scientists, and other potential readers who do not have access to a research library that can afford to pay for journal subscriptions." That's garbage: there are plenty of abstracts available on-line, and anyone in the U.S. can get the article through an inter-library loan.

Not surprisingly, the free distribution model seems be going over well. Isn't that premature? The fact that the readers try to consume the free good says nothing. Bread in the Soviet Russia was also cheap, and then it disappeared.

More disturbing is the fact that the author failed to ask an important question: is $1,500 publication fee not a barrier for dissemination of information? It appears to me that it does. If a scholar writes four papers a year, where is (s)he gonna get $6,000 to publish them?

[FairOpinion]

"No financial barrier to authors. As a nonprofit organization, PLoS will charge authors a fair price that reflects the actual cost of publication. However, the ability of authors to pay publication charges will never be a consideration in the decision whether to publish."

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Looks to me that they won't charge people who can't afford to pay. They are a nonprofit organization, so perhaps they'll get donations to enable them to publish authors who can't afford to pay also.