Publishing scientific research is an area of study that attracts interest
from various stakeholders such as publishers, academic and research staff,
libraries and funders. In the past decade increased journal subscription fees
prompted calls for cheaper and more efficient means of accessing the scientific
literature. Factors such as the expansion of digital repositories, the introduction
of open source journal management software, an increasing awareness within
the scholarly community at large of the issues around open access, and an
increasing readiness within the publishing community to experiment with new
models, suggest that the circumstances may now be right for new models of
scientific publishing to be explored, as well as potential business models and
sustainable solutions around them. This paper explores some of the issues
around the costs and sustainability of a prospective journal model known as the
overlay journal. We present estimates of initial start up costs for such a model,
discuss the factors that would influence scientists in deciding whether to
publish in a journal overlaid onto a public repository; and report their views on
the relative importance of different features and functions of a journal in terms
of funding priorities
