"What on earth would keep a bunch of well funded liars like American Heritage Institute from buying up all the articles they want?"

Peer-review. PeerJ is particularly good on this, in that it allows the whole peer-review history of papers to be published alongside the final version: the original submission, the reviews, the handling editor's decision, the authors' rebuttal letter and revision, subsequent editorial comments, etc. As an example, you can see this audit trail for our own PeerJ paper on sauropod necks.

I agree that what we really want is a system where the price of publishing is part of the price of doing research. That is what we're moving towards as funding bodies increasingly allow publication fees to be covered by their grants. But even without this, charging to publish is much better than charging to read, because it's a non-monopoly market. When Elsevier charge $40 to read one of their articles, a reader doesn't have the choice of going to a different publisher: no other publisher has the specific article the reader needs. But when they charge $3000 to publish my article I can go to any rival that offers similar services, and find one that instead charges $1350 (PLOS ONE) or $99 (PeerJ).

Check the PeerJ site. Peer-reviewers are chosen by an academic editor -- standard practice at scholarly journals. There is a board of 800 academic editors (PeerJ's planning to get big, quickly). That large board is overseen by a much smaller senior board to 20 scientists (of whom five have Nobel prizes to their names). It's serious stuff.

For some reason, Wordpress published this article as though it had been pushed two days ago. When I changed the release date to today, that changed the permalink, if you can imagine anything so dumb. So the link that I submitted is now broken -- D'oh! Please amend to: http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/where-dijkstra-went-wrong-the-value-of-basic-as-a-first-programming-language/ Sorry about that.