Dissemination models rely on payments by or on behalf of authors to finance publication. Many types of publishers are exploring the use of author-side fees to fund open access (OA) journals. Some of these are nonprofit, such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and some are for profit, such as BioMed Central. An increasing number of funding agencies explicitly allow the use of grant funds for author publication charges. The Wellcome Trust, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the National Institutes for Health, strongly encourage publication in OA journals.
