How to run an overlay journal?

Question

Assuming you want to run an overlay journal like Discrete Analysis on top of a common pre-print server like arXiv, bioRxiv etc., which technical, organisational and legal issues do you need to address in order to create and maintain it? Which solutions exist already and what still needs to be developed? What are good practices?

Answer 1

From a technical perspective there are several solutions available:

1. Using a commercial service like Scholastica which requires to pay a fixed service fee per published article (5 / 10 USD). The journal Discrete Analysis is the most prominent example going that path. ScienceOpen's Collections could also be used to run an overlay journal on top a pre-print server (they cover already now the full arXiv corpus) as described here.
2. Episciences.org is a similar but publicly funded platform developed and maintained by the Centre pour la communication scientifique directe and (as far as I see) does not require any fees.
3.  The Open Journal (an open-access journal for astrophysics and cosmology) has implemented its own open source peer-reviewing system using Ruby on Rails which can be easily adapted for other journals.