Open journals that piggyback on arXiv gather momentum : Nature News & Comment

"An astrophysicist has launched a low-cost community peer-review platform that circumvents traditional scientific publishing — and by making its software open-source, he is encouraging scientists in other fields to do the same. The Open Journal of Astrophysics works in tandem with manuscripts posted on the pre-print server arXiv. Researchers submit their papers from arXiv directly to the journal, which evaluates them by conventional peer review. Accepted versions of the papers are then re-posted to arXiv and assigned a DOI, and the journal publishes links to them. By piggybacking on or 'overlaying' the arXiv repository, the journal should operate at a fraction of the cost of traditional publishers and will be free for both readers and authors, says journal founder and editor-in-chief, Peter Coles, an astrophysicist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. He announced on 22 December that the journal was open for submissions. It will go live later this month, once its first papers have undergone review ..."