[RonF]

A couple of questions:

1) Who's doing the peer reviewing for this journal? Is it a peer reviewed journal?

2) The problem with an author-financed journal is that the publisher has an incentive to overlook problems with articles in order to get the publishing fee.

[FairOpinion]

Good points, but if they relax their standards of excellence, the quality goes down.

They look legit. They are nonprofit.

PLoS Core principles:

"Open access. All material published by the Public Library of Science, whether submitted to or created by PLoS, will be published under an open-access license that allows unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Excellence. PLoS will strive to set the highest standards for excellence in everything we do: in content, style, and aesthetics of presentation; in editorial performance at every level; in transparency and accessibility to the scientific community and public; and in educational value.

Scientific integrity. PLoS is committed to a fair, rigorous editorial process. Scientific quality and importance will be the sole considerations in publication decisions. The basis for decisions will be communicated to authors.

Breadth. Although pragmatic considerations require us to focus initially on publishing high-impact research in the life sciences, we intend to expand our scope as rapidly as practically possible, to provide a vehicle for publication of other valuable scientific or scholarly articles.

Cooperation. PLoS welcomes and will actively seek opportunities to work cooperatively with any group (scientific/scholarly societies, physicians, patient advocacy groups, educational organizations) and any publisher who shares our commitment to open access and to making scientific information available for the good of science and the public.

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.

[Doctor Stochastic]

The regular journals have page charges too.

[Right Wing Professor]

The problem with an author-financed journal is that the publisher has an incentive to overlook problems with articles in order to get the publishing fee.

Author fees are rather common; it's not just this journal charging them. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about as august a journal as there is, used to have (and may still have) a little notice on the front page of each paper, stating that because the author had paid publication fees, the paper had to be legally described as an 'advertisement'.