I really like the outreach part of the project. Really. This is a bit what I personally try to do here on Steem (making my field of research more understandable to everyone), and we should habe more of such initiatives.

However, what you say with respect to the publishing system is not entirely true. There are many very good open access initiatives (where also referee reports are sometimes open). Moreover, the arxiv is also a great initiative for having all articles available even before being submitted to a journal. All of this is free, open access, etc.

In order to satisfy and impress the journal editors, scientific articles are written in a very sophisticated manner with lots of abbreviations and jargon from specific fields. Therefore, science articles have become impossible to understand for non-scholarly educated people, and are even very difficult to understand for scientists from another field.

In my opinion, the articles are hard to understand because they are written for peers (and not to impress the editors at all, who are by the way also peers). Peer-review is what assesses the quality of the articles (and not the editor alone). Moreover, non-scholarly people are not those people supposed to read these published scientific articles. For them, blogs may be better options to get an essence of what is going on (and some, although not enough, exist).

Personally, and this is maybe the most important part for your initiative, I won’t submit any article to the Fair Journal. The reason is that I cannot find any information about the editorial team, the referral system that is used, guidelines for authors, etc. In other words, I cannot find the ‘step 0’ that will allow me to start building some trust to the initiative.

PS: just to be clear, I am all in favor of the outreach part but much more skeptical for the scientific journal part.