There are a number of questions on RG about print and on-line scientific journals, for example, Do you agree that the digital revolution can fix scientific publishing and speed-up discoveries? As the number of scholarly journals published on the web increases shouldn't there be some logic, order, consistency, and similarity in the way they operate and are designed (functions, capabilities, etc.). Consistency of web interface and inter-connectivity with each other along with organizations like RG would be invaluable to journal editors and reviewers, researchers/authors, and the academic community. If you agree with this suggestion, how could we encourage on-line journals to form a consortium? Could RG contact them with a mass mailing (since the journals appear in RG's database)?
I agree that Open access journals are one of the ways to improve dissemination of academic scholarship. It will also circumvent many of the problems with associated to large commercial behind pay wall publishers. It also could speed up dissemination since online publication can increase turnaround times.
I am not sure if a consortium is a good idea because one of the principles behind many open access journals is independence from publishers or large overarching bodies. On the other hand, some co-ordination could be helpful an the best way to do this is using existing platforms such as Facebook or a wordpress site to provide easy access in one place to independent open access journals. It is probably difficult to directly contact journals through RG because you need to target editors and they are not necessarily on RG. Using this QA tool might be a better way to reach people.
On a unified interface, that in effect already exists because most electronic journals, ope or not, are published in the industry standard PDF and presented using standard tools.
I think that the social network itself can be the host of editorial boards, journal repositories, review repositories, supplementary materials repositories. The journals will self-organise by the mutual participation of editors and reviewers, and RG can provide computational facilities (even unto publishing) to those groups. I don't see such benefits as being terribly costly; publishing seems to be a minimal capital cost enterprise.
We would need some quality control for On-line Academic Journals. Is a Consortium the best way to achieve that, I do not know. Anyway we need some list of good open access journals in addition to the existing negative list of Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access journals:
http://scholarlyoa.com/individual-journals/
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