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that'd be this link

that'll teach me to use preview esp. when I've been spending too much time on sites where the article discussions use bbcode

Here's a good list of what journal publishers do - http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/07/18/a-proposed-list-60-things-journal-publishers-do/

The things that strikes me most about these discussions is the question of what we want our journals (and your articles) to be. Are we looking for a race to the cheapest possible publishing systems or are we looking to maintain an environment where there is true incentive to compete for business and continual improvement to the authoring/reading experience?

Anyone can publish the results of their research for free online. Just put it up on your university sponsored web space or post it on Facebook. Maybe the people you know will read it. Maybe even some of the people that they know. Plenty of popular authors making a good living doing just this type of thing. They self publish with Amazon, for example.

But simply publishing something doesn't make it a success and most scientists aren't professional authors. They want to publish their material and move on to the next research project. So, there's a market for helping these scientists get what they want and their's a cost related to these tradeoffs, whether that cost is through publication charges or subscription paywalls.

There are lots of thing that should change - and are changing - in the academic publishing world. The best publishers these days act a lot more like technology companies than the content aggregators of old. They're underwriting the improvements that authors and readers are asking for. They may not move as fast as some people want, but they are balancing a lot more stakeholders than just the folks saying "I want it free and now". They support scholarly societies and invest in the explosive grow in new journal titles. They fulfill the requests of editorial boards. They employ the overwhelming majority of people who spend their waking hours working on and thinking about how to make publishing/reading scholarly articles better for everyone involved. Yes, some of them have stockholders too. I suspect that all of us could think of much worse things to say about someone other than that he believes strongly enough in the importance of a robust scholarly publishing system to bet on the success of that industry.

The proper course of action would have been for them to line up equally (apparently) qualified academicians on their side of the argument and let the book-buying institutions decide for themselves. It would seem that both sides of the argument were already being hashed out on the blog, and now arrives The Streisand Effect in spades!

It would appear that this company's reputation is already well pretty. well established

The nicest thing I have seen so far are the comments that say it is just one step above a vanity press.

eLife (joint journal from MPI, HHMI, WT) pays reviewers if they returned their reviews rapidly (pos or neg). I heard it's €2k when it's returned in 7 days. http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2011/12/01/elife-can-a-top-tier-journal-run-without-professional-help/

This "hyperinflation" you speak of is alive, in all its quadruple-digit glory, in the academic textbooks market.

Another problem that lots of people have brought up is the CC non commercial license that Nature is using. This could hamper the Open Access movement (and an author's ultimate impact). Some people go as far as to claim that non-commercial licenses aren't Open Access at all and can indeed hinder progress down the line. At any rate, ONE has at least three years until Nature gets its report card (=impact factor). PLoS ONE is already the largest journal in the world (by volume), and if it can maintain quality, the Public Lib of Science should be safely sustainable in the long run. But make no mistake, Nature is coming here with guns blazing.

http://journalology.blogspot.com/2008/08/short-post-about-bentham-open.html

Bentham Open is mostly known for spamming researchers, so far as I can tell. I've received one or two spam solicitations from them myself. As for the 9/11 conspiracy paper, the editor-in-chief of that journal resigned because it was published without her knowledge or approval:

http://screwloosechange.blogspot.com/2009/04/bentham-editor-resigns-over-steven.html

They've also accepted nonsense articles:

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/06/10/nonsense-for-dollars/

Doesn't seem to be a very professional organization ...

Of course.. this just shows you how deep the conspiracy goes... ;)

In that case, editorial groups can select papers they consider particularly interesting. Such groups may end up being similar to the current major journals, but they would not hinder access to scientific results

And how does that get paid for? Isn't that just pushing the same subscription money around a little differently? Sure, you could access the material for free, but there's so much of it that you can't make heads or tails of it. So you end up paying for editorial oversight, and we're right back where we started.

Also note that open archives without editorial oversight like arXiv are already being gamed for advantage.