I think that would be great, but without getting several famous researchers to serve as editors for each new journal at the subfield level, it’s not going to ad

I think that would be great, but without getting several famous researchers to serve as editors for each new journal at the subfield level, it’s not going to address the real problem. Citations and impact (real and perceived) are the currency of academia — people publish in Science, Nature, and high-impact-factor Elsevier journals because those are the journals that “everybody reads,” and a new open access venue is going to be written off by many academics (read PhD advisors) as “nobody has heard of it, no one will see it, no one will cite it.” I don’t think this is really true anymore, since we have much better tooling for discovering research, but it’s a very commonly held attitude among older academics. Without changing this perception at the subfield level, academic publishing isn’t going to change. Citation counting and h-index ranking just plays too large a role in hiring, promotion, tenure, and funding decisions. What might help is for an established researcher to publish a splashy important result in a new open venue. It doesn’t happen much because publishing Nature-worthy research in “some upstart open access journal” leaves a lot of prestige and fanfare on the table.