Scholastica's practice of charging $10 for each submission seems ridiculous: if someone submits a million dummy submissions the journal has to ask support to forgive the charges...
I think that a much better approach would be to require papers to be submitted as Git pulls adding TeX files, and then use a free code review tool like Gerrit to do peer review.
That might take a bit more learning than Scholastica, so starting with Scholastica until the journal is more popular might make sense, but using such expensive proprietary software doesn't seem to be acceptable long term, and if a tool works for peer review of code changes, it should work for peer review of articles as well (maybe with some customization if needed).
Ten dollars is nothing. As others have noted publication charges tend to run more in the thousands.
And talking of programming tools, like git, and gerrit for academic papers is completely off base. Most mathematicians will never even have heard of git.
The "free" version is something like what the episcience project is attempting.
Edit: And as yet others have said, it's crucial, especially in a structurally very conservative field like mathematics, to stay as close to the conventional model as possible.
> but using such expensive proprietary software doesn't seem to be acceptable long term
Is $10 per paper really that expensive? The recent papers I've published have come with page charges in excess of $1000 (in a not-for-profit journal). Obviously it's far from an apples–apples comparison, because the $1000 pays for things like the journal having a copyeditor to go through the manuscript and also results in reduced subscription fees (~5x less than another comparable journal in the field). Though, for this "overlay" journal, the subscription point is obviously moot. But, from an author's perspective, $10 seems like a steal.
I think that a much better approach would be to require papers to be submitted as Git pulls adding TeX files, and then use a free code review tool like Gerrit to do peer review.
That might take a bit more learning than Scholastica, so starting with Scholastica until the journal is more popular might make sense, but using such expensive proprietary software doesn't seem to be acceptable long term, and if a tool works for peer review of code changes, it should work for peer review of articles as well (maybe with some customization if needed).