What I find particularly distressing is the extent to which journals have signed on with commercial services for their online presence, where one of these firms charges $3000 [sic!] for open access and certain universities pay that fee—in spite of the fact that authors are allowed to put the paper up for all the world to see at their own websites!

There are many, many academic libraries who are ready and/or willing to provide the infrastructure to publish and online journal of quality scholarship. My own library would thrilled to do more projects like PI. Even and especially in these difficult budgetary times we see investment in alternative means of scholarly distribution as a high priority. I believe that there are many scholars who are willing to provide scholarly labor in exchange for rewards other than monetary ones. Our challenge is to find ways to bring all these willing parties together.

If you know of journals in search of “adoption,” please do not hesitate to be in touch. I might be able to be of assistance.

One of the things that worries me is file-compatibility. It’s already a bit of a pain to pull out files in 10 year old formats. Maybe we’ve standardised enough on PDF that that won’t be a problem, but you never know.

Having said that, journals that put copy protection on the articles themselves make this problem much worse. My credence that we’ll be able in 20 years to easily read articles with 2009-era copy protection built in is well under 0.5.

“I do think there is a legitimate worry about archiving electronic data, just because we have no history of it being done successfully over a centuries-long timespan.”

I think you’re being too pessimistic here. Librarians and publishers have been hard at work to solve this problem and there are trust-worthy mechanisms in place now, such as the Portico service. Open-access journals typically have an additional advantage, because they often allow anybody to distribute the articles so that there should be wide-spread diffusion, which will insulate the content from local disturbances.

Having said that, I do think there is a legitimate worry about archiving electronic data, just because we have no history of it being done successfully over a centuries-long timespan. I’d like to see journals have paper copies that are (cheaply) sold as well as free online access. Of course, this does require some funding!

here is a real opportunity to do something positive. And given that Brian is involved, we should ask him to back up his previous good words.

And Philosophers’ imprint did pretty well in the survey you mention. Maybe not as well as it deserved but pretty well nonetheless. Not bad for a journal which is less than 9 years old.