[grsites]

> Building a web app to allow researchers to submit their articles and have them peer-reviewed by other researchers would be an interesting project that could actually disrupt the industry.

True, but the chicken and egg problem prevents that from taking off: researchers submit to the highest impact journal they can get the article in, not the open access journals. Similarly, they won't submit their articles to such a service until it is already well established.

I'm hoping that bringing the problem to light will provide an impetus to evolve to a better system.

[_delirium]

In a few fields the bootstrapping has taken place by having the entire editorial board of a top journal leave en masse to start a new one, which in a few cases then quickly takes over. The most successful case I know of is the Machine Learning board leaving to set up Journal of Machine Learning Research, which is now considered top-tier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Res...