[mindcrime]

Agreed. Throwing gobs of money at Elsevier, Springer, etc., regardless of whether it's front-end or back-end, doesn't seem like a winning proposition to me.

I'm not going to say that they don't add any value, but the existence of overlay journals like Discrete Analysis, and other high-quality "pure play" open-access journals like JMLR, and JAIR, etc., suggest to me that it's possible to create a journal system where very little money is required on either end. I think our aspiration should be to see most scientific publishing move to such a model.