"A bottleneck to mainstream use is the lack of overlap between hackers/devs and people who are most influential in academic publishing, such as senior editors.

"A bottleneck to mainstream use is the lack of overlap between hackers/devs and people who are most influential in academic publishing, such as senior editors. To developers the question is: if editors want to post their articles on the web, why don't they just do that? To editors, the question is: how can I practically make my journal open access? There is a need for technology to assist in setting up open access journals." That seems pretty far-fetched. Lots of Open Access journals and preprint platforms exist, and there is no evidence that lack of a suitable software platform is a limitation. The problem is more one of those new outlets gaining sufficient reputation to be trusted by more people (and hiring comittees) and figuring out how they should sustain themselves financially. With the more adventurous approaches the main problem is once again coming up with a model that is actually better and then convincing a whole scientific community to drop their current approach and make their careers depend on a new publishing model. Writing the software is easy by comparison.