Although it is still a relatively rare occurrence, several journal boards have broken away from large commercial publishers. A good list is at the Open Access Directory. These journals usually are required to change their name, because the previous publisher will not relinquish it. They are cut off from the enormous support provided by large commercial publishers (after all their subscription prices are so high, the money is surely being put back into developing better infrastructure, rather than, say enriching shareholders, giving inflated honoraria to editors or paying inefficient support staff). Thus one might expect that these journals would struggle.
I looked at the fortunes of the mathematics journals that have taken this route. Below I list the original title name, the approximate date of the breakaway, the new title and publisher, and citation impact measures taken from 2014 data at eigenfactor.org, and compare them to the results for the original journal. Those measures are EF (size-dependent measure of importance) and AI (analogous to Impact Factor, but based on the same kind of reasoning as underlies PageRank – not all citations are equal). Each has a maximum value of 100. These are of course not the only measures one could use. I also list CE, the 2013 cost-effectiveness rating from journalprices.com (essentially, subscription cost per citation) – the smaller the better.
Old: Journal of Logic Programming (Elsevier), changed name more than once to Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming, still publishing, EF = 0, AI = 0, CE = 84.73
New: (1999) Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (Cambridge), EF = 31, AI = 40, 42.33
Old: Machine Learning (Springer), EF = 77, AI = 92, CE = 27.01
New: (2001) Journal of Machine Learning Research (diamond OA), EF = 94, AI = 97, CE = 0.0
Old: Topology and Its Applications (Elsevier), still publishing, EF = 78, AI = 33, CE = 32.34
New: (2001) Algebraic and Geometric Topology (Math Sciences Press), EF = 77, AI = 77, CE = 3.67
EDIT: I received email from Alex Scorpan saying: “The facts are that AGT was born by splitting off from “Geometry & Topology”. The resignation of the board of “Topology and its Applications” may have occurred at the same time, may have involved people on the board of AGT, and may have involved the same ethos that moved the founders of GT and AGT, but otherwise the two events are not connected.” Alex has edited the OAD wiki to fix this. I haven’t looked into the question any further.
Old: Journal of Algorithms (Elsevier), stopped publishing after 6-7 years.
New: (2003) Transactions on Algorithms (ACM), EF = 60, AI = 76, CE = 5.57
Old: Topology (Elsevier), stopped publishing after 6 years
New: (2006) Journal of Topology (Oxford), EF = 70, AI = 93, CE = 39.24
Old: K-Theory (Springer), stopped publishing very soon, and archives disappeared.
New: (2007) Annals of K-Theory (Math Sciences Press) (after an intermediate change to Journal of K-Theory (Cambridge), EF = 59, AI = 79, CE = 102.47), too new for EF, AI
Old: Journal of Philosophical Logic (Springer), still publishing, no EF, AI or CE listed (the website lists only “interim editors”)
New: (2007) Review of Symbolic Logic (Cambridge) EF = 35, AI = 49, CE = 222.58
It seems clear that the new journals are doing considerably better than the old ones overall. I wonder whether the idea often touted by radical leftist OA advocates that large commercial publishers don’t add much value could have a grain of truth in it.