PeerJ founder Peter Binfield answers questions for Publishers' Weekly: "Scholarly Publishing 2012: Meet PeerJ ".
First of all, we have no intention of becoming a social network, or any kind of “Facebook for Scientists.” But clearly our membership base does constitute a group of peers who will have various interactions that we can track and encourage. For example, a member might simultaneously be an author, a reviewer, a commenter, and an academic editor—and we will facilitate all these interactions and will provide “reputation” systems that will track and display an individual’s activity in each respect.
I'm interested in the PeerJ model, in which all authors must have paid lifetime memberships, and publication itself is open access with no author charges. Integrating the preprint server directly with the journal also strikes me as a good idea. What remains to be seen is whether the model will get over the hump that inhibits pre-publication and post-publication review.