Hot Type: Scholars Create High-Impact Journal for About $100 per Year - Publishing - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"A group of herpetologists...has been quietly demonstrating that it's possible to put together a well-regarded, researcher-run journal with the tiniest of budgets and no help from a publisher....Herpetological Conservation and Biology...founded in 2006, is an online-only, open-access, peer-reviewed journal with a budget of about $100 a year....And it has just hit a milestone: The editors learned in December 2010 that HCB will be included in Journal Citation Reports, a service run by...Thomson Reuters that calculates impact factors for journals...[T]he editors expect the journal to rate highly. That credential will help reassure potential contributors, especially researchers who don't yet have tenure, that publishing an article in HCB will be good for their careers....Judged by the number of visitors to the site, the journal has caught on. In its first year, 2006, it received just over 6,000 unique visitors. In 2010 it received 42,288...[T]he number of submissions that are deemed good enough to be sent out for peer-review stage—more than 100 in 2010—has more than doubled since 2006...."