eLife--A Paradigm Shift in Scholarly Publishing?

I was reviewing recent emails from Kurzweil.net, and one of them pointed me to this blog post on Nature.com: ‘eLife’ Journal Takes Another Step Forward.  I think the project is commendable.  In short, a number of large, well-funded research foundations, including "the US Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the UK Wellcome Trust and Germany’s Max Planck Society," have teamed up with (at least 175) scientists to publish an open-source journal.  This appears to be a serious endeavor given the players involved and the apparent time and effort everyone is putting into this one.  In fact, per the blog post, "its backers hope that the publication will eventually rival Nature and Science as a top-tier journal."

As I have noted in the past, I am in favor of making all scholarly publications open to public purview without charge.  If the eLife venture is successful, it might entail a paradigm shift which leads other journals to take the open source route.  Only time will tell.  Regardless, the eLife project is something to keep an eye on in the coming months/years.