What’s the return? Or…how is it possible that Open Library of Humanities works?

"Following on from my post yesterday a couple of questions popped up about collective and collectivist models in scholarly communications. Richard Poynder is skeptical, which left me nonplussed because from where I sit what I described is happening all over the place. Funders are looking at investment strategies, collectives are forming and some of them are growing very rapidly. Which brings us to the second and more concrete question. How is it that things like Open Library of Humanities, a collective funding model for journal publishing, and similar models like Knowledge Unlatched* for books, work?"