The scientific method
Many congratulations to PLoS Biology on its launch!
One thing I didn't realize about PLoS journals is that authors have to pay $1,500 to have their articles published. (The articles are peer-reviewed; it isn't vanity publishing as we understand that term.) I had assumed that the foundation grants supporting PLoS would also take care of the expenses so that authors wouldn't have to pay to publish, but that turned out not to be the case. I suppose this is because many foundations hate to pay for "operational expenses" or "recurring costs", and presumably the costs of reviewing and publishing papers are nothing if not operational and recurring.
Peter Suber thinks this is not such a big problem, for many reasons.
For its part, PLoS says that
a new business model for scientific publishing is required that treats the costs of publication as the final integral step of the funding of a research project.
This model is different from some other open-access publishing, which may not have any "funding" in the first place. It really seems that the relevant costs are coming from the formal peer review and formal editing steps.
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