Funding
PeerLibrary has no formal funding and is funded primarily through some EECS grants and through members' individual contributions. There are several partners who have helped PeerLibrary with setting up. The servers are provided by the EECS department at UC Berkeley and CrossRef and Mendeley are helping us with data. We have also applied to Big Ideas competition and could receive some grant from this avenue if we win. Another approach is to look for donations through platforms like Flattr.
Effect on community's dynamics
I would argue that the contributors of PeerLibrary are motivated more by the cause than by any monetary reward. I don't think that monetary compensations would significantly increase the contribution for the core team at this stage. I feel that because this core team is motivated by the cause, they end up making more decisions collaboratively as none of them have the motivation to just finish up their money's worth of contribution and walk away with no responsibility. But in the future, that there should be a compensation structure for contributors once there are more active contributors, to keep some contributors working on the project full time. Since the long-term vision for PeerLibrary is to be the hub for all research and learning, I think being a non-profit is the way to go, as it will avoid falling into the loops of being revenue-driven which may lead to creation of many lock-ins going against the principles of PeerLibrary of being "Open Knowledge. Open Access. Open Source".
Competition
PeerLibrary has a bunch of similar projects which we try to keep a record of here. But instead of trying to beat our competitors, we try to learn from them, collect data about their positives and negatives and even try to think of ways collaborate with them. It is important to keep an eye out for similar projects, because it wouldn't make sense to have another open source project to just reinvent the wheel.