1. How would you monetize your alternative system? Elsevier and cie are extremely profitable because of the ridiculous subscriptions that universities and research centers pay for. But even free alternatives like PLOS had to be monetized to pay for servers, editing, and website management. They chose to do so by making researchers pay to publish. Would your system do the same?
  2. How would you measure the impact of a "paper" (or whatever that non-static publication would be called) without any ranking system? Indexes are questionable because of how they only rely on citations to measure impact, but they serve a purpose and a need and cannot be removed without alternatives.


Alberto_Pepe
Co-Founder | Authorea
  1. Our business model is a Freemium model whereby Authorea is free to use as long as you produce public content. You can write as many documents as you like on Authorea for free as long as you keep them "open". If you want to create private documents, you pay for private hosting. By using this model, we are encouraging authors to do "open research". Please note that Authorea does not have copyright on the content. All content produced is the ownership of authors. An author can delete, download, modify content at any point in time. So, in that sense, we are very different from traditional publishers (including PLOS, which is basically a traditional publisher). For the time being, we plan to keep charging scholarly authors, who pay because they are using a collaborative tool writing tool built exactly for them. We are getting increasing interest from institutions, departments, research labs who want to buy group licenses.

  2. As I said in a couple of other answers, I am not advocating for "no ranking system". However, scholars' contributions should be assessed across more components than simply number of citations. I suggest, in another answer, "number of forks" as a way to assess the impact of a scholar in "giving birth" to new research results. In other words, if a piece of code you wrote in, say, a genomics paper, is readapted by astronomers to bring about an amazing new discovery in, say, exoplanetary science, we should be able to reward you, and visualize the provenance.