A few weeks ago the Open Library of the Humanities (OLH) released an open source, test version of Janeway, the software they have developed for publishing journals.
At Leicester, we use a version of Open Journal System (OJS) to publish several journals associated with academic departments.
OJS is widely used by libraries who support journal publishing. In the UK, Aberdeen, Kent and UCL all use it. It fair to say that many users have a love/hate relationship with it. Editors and reviewers, in particular, find the 'back end' difficult to use.
The release of Janeway, therefore, sparked our interest. From a readers' point of view, OLH journals have always looked attractive and felt easy to navigate. More than that, the release felt like another step towards a more coordinated open access publishing infrastructure. A clearer division of labour emerging where OLH concentrate on 'flipping' subscription journals to OA, and individual libraries concentrate on supporting existing publishing initiatives, and developing new ones. We plan to test Janeway at some point this year; we'll let you know how we get on.