Abstract. This paper delineates the main characteristics of the Episciences platform, an environment for overlay peerreviewing that complements existing publication repositories, designed by the Centre pour la Communication Scientifique directe (CCSD) 1 service unit. We describe the main characteristics of the platform and present the first experiment of launching two journals in the computer science domain onto it. Finally, we address a series of open questions related to the actual changes in editorial models (open submission, open peer-review, augmented publication) that such a platform is likely to raise, as well as some hints as to the underlying business model. Keywords: Overlay journal, editorial platform, scholarly communication, repositories, Open Access Exploring new scholarly publication modelsThe recent debates on Open Access have mainly focused on opposing models, the so-called green model, where scientists deposit their (possibly published) research papers in open repositories and the gold model where publishers, usually following the payment of an author fee, freely release the publication online. This debate often misses two points. First, that what is at stake is to have a reliable and sustainable communication system for science where scientists themselves have the say and are provided with all means to quickly disseminate their results while receiving the appropriate feedback (usually embodied by peer-reviewing) from their communities. Second, that all data generated around the evaluation, the reviews and the associated discussions (forums, etc.) shall be monitored by the scientific community.Still, we know that alternative models to the traditional publisher-owned journals are possible, and experiences carried out in the human sciences with the OpenEdition endeavour for instance have shown that research communities may react favourably when a real alternative is being offered. Such initiatives provide a systemic concept of publishing (from scholarly blogs to journal publications) comprising both new editorial frameworks and business models.In this context, we present a new initiative to provide an overlay journal environment, i.e. a journal that is built as an additional peer-reviewing layer on top of a publication repository (see [9]). This

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