What do you think about independent action from the editorial side? The number is still fairly small, but there have been several successful instances of a commercial journal's editorial board resigning en masse and setting up an open-access journal intended to replace it.
JMLR, at least, has gone on to successfully eclipse the journal, Machine Learning, that it was intended to replace (about 3x the impact factor).
I do notice that the examples I find are all in computer science and mathematics, and the new journals have basically zero budgets (and like it that way) and don't charge authors any fees. Is this because in CS/math a common expectation is that the author can use LaTeX, produce their own figures, and submit a print-ready PDF, whereas in other fields authors expect significant formatting work to be done by the journal?
At the moment the impact of these actions seems significantly smaller than policy. But perhaps it's a useful complement, showing policy-makers that many faculty support open access.
As regards your CS/math question, it's a good one, and I don't know enough about the cost structure of the journals in question to answer. I suspect from conversations with journal editors that it's not a whole lot cheaper to produce CS/math journals than other types, but that's just a general impression, not a certainty.
I suspect from conversations with journal editors that it's not a whole lot cheaper to produce CS/math journals than other types, but that's just a general impression, not a certainty.
There seem to at least be some that are much cheaper, in the sense of having budgets literally approaching $0. From some brief chats with JMLR editors, they're in that camp: they run on donated server space from MIT and volunteer editors. No staff, no office, no recurring expenses, yet they're still one of the top journals in CS. That seems like a significantly different cost structure from something like PLoS ONE, perhaps closer to the arXiv model turned into a journal.
A few examples:
http://www.sigir.org/forum/F2001/sigirFall01Letters.html
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=442
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=581
JMLR, at least, has gone on to successfully eclipse the journal, Machine Learning, that it was intended to replace (about 3x the impact factor).
I do notice that the examples I find are all in computer science and mathematics, and the new journals have basically zero budgets (and like it that way) and don't charge authors any fees. Is this because in CS/math a common expectation is that the author can use LaTeX, produce their own figures, and submit a print-ready PDF, whereas in other fields authors expect significant formatting work to be done by the journal?