Setting the Agenda: Key Issues for Scholarly Publishing

"The “author-pays” business model. This is distinct from open access, with which it is usually paired. The importance of this model, pioneered by BioMed Central and now widely imitated, is that it taps a new revenue source, authors, and thus is a positive response to the challenge of library bypass. At this time no one knows how far author-pays can go. Can it handle long-form texts, aka books, as well as journal articles? Will there by a great number of such services, or will the author-pays model lead to greater industry consolidation, as the broad-based services of PLoS ONE seem to imply? Also of interest is how new revenue opportunities can be layered on top of the base texts...."