[pzh]

I think you'd be amazed how small most of the scientific communities in certain areas of research are. If you have the names of a few well-known researchers on the editorial board or in the list of reviewers of an open-access/electronic journal, this will instanty establish its credentials and authority. After all, researchers care mostly about the quality of the work and the results, and not so much about the branding.

[thr0waway1239]

Has this not been true for a long time though? Why haven't new upstart publishers thrown the larger ones out already?

[pzh]

To be honest, I don't really know why this hasn't picked up yet. Maybe the scientific community is not very easy to get organized, as researchers are pretty busy with research, teaching, writing grant proposals, serving on committees, acting as reviewers, etc. There have been some attempts in CS with various success, though.

Another factor may be that most research (at least in CS) gets presented at conferences, gets published in conference proceedings first, and then journal publications are mostly an afterthought, and in many cases are skipped entirely. Organizing a conference with open-access proceedings may not be as cheap and easy as setting up a web-site and getting a few well-known names to serve as reviewers...

[gsnedders]

Plenty of rankings of universities are done based on research output, based on upon where publications are, often based on rankings that are rarely updated of journals and conferences.