Dear Bill,

I'm not quite sure what the relevance of some of these questions is but I'll try to answer them.

1) the publication fee on PLoS ONE is $1,250. That is the same for any published paper. However if authors do not have funding to cover costs of publication they can ask for a full or partial waiver of that fee. Which papers receive those waivers is a private matter between PLoS and the authors, and something that is not revealed to editors so that it cannot affect the decision to publish papers.

2) maintaining and archive of papers will cost money, though how much over the next 100 years is impossible to guess. This is of course a new cost to publishers as in the past libraries bore the entire cost of maintaining print collections of journals. All PLoS papers are of course independently archived and available in the NIH's PubMed Central.

3) I guess costs to PLoS do increase somewhat if a paper is popular in that there will be greater traffic Internet traffic to that paper increasing server and bandwidth costs. This isn't something that we will worry about at a paper by paper level.

4) Translations are interesting. Because the paper is published Open Access anyone is free to translate it and make it available in whole or on part as long as the original source is properly cited. Some authors do this themselves and you will sometimes find author's translations of papers attached as supplementary information.

5) Good idea, we will see what can be done.