[shellfishgene]

I don't think authors are very price sensitive. If they can get their paper into a good journal they will pay the charges, as long as they are not absurdly high. After all, it's not their personal money, often the employer also pays, as they also need high impact papers to generate funding. Nobody who can get their paper into Nature will publish with PLOS Biology instead because it's cheaper. I'm pretty sure if I went to my institute director and said I need 10k APC to publish this in Nature but ran out of funding they would be annoyed, but still find the money.

In the end the details do not really matter, it is still absurd that a high percentage of the money paid in whatever way is just profit for company investors, for a system in which 80% of the skilled work is done for fee by the scientists.

I'm not sure if APCs will reduce the paper flood. Especially if the APCs are near the real cost of publishing, having a published paper will always be worth more to the authors. This is how we get all the junk journals that publish anything as long as you pay after all.