The way science in general has handled this is by Open Access publishers, most notably the the Public Library of Science.

The bit above that caught my eye was this “if all authors decide to upload their papers and books…it could change publishing overnight.” You might not be aware of Mendeley http://mendeley.com, but that’s pretty much what they’re trying to do. They already have a catalog of research that’s one of the largest in the world, entirely from user uploads, and it’s growing exponentially.

The point about publishers’ needing to make a profit is valid; however, it is valid only if we assume that the traditional publication model is sound and must be sustained at all costs (which is far from obvious when it comes to specialist scholarship with a small readership, which is expensive to publish in small runs and correspondingly [sometimes astronomically] expensive to purchase, limiting sales to the best-funded libraries and a few individuals), and it loses force when we are talking about publications (esp. journal articles) from years ago, on which there is no further earning to be had, if there ever was to begin with – they have long been read, if at all, in libraries or in photocopies or scans made in libraries, and it is only the rise of databases like JSTOR – which lock out the private individual user – that has given them a partial new lease of economic life (but even then many probably go largely unaccessed and unread). Much the same is true of specialist books unlikely ever to be reprinted, especially if the publisher has no plans at all to make the work available digitally. And the broader point is that if scholars, especially at public institutions, began to favour or to be encouraged to favour open access publication to begin with, and the academic system begins to recognize it, this would be a way around the increasing problems for libraries, institutions, and scholars of the multiplication of journals, all competing for subscriptions and submissions, and readers finding things impossible to access.

Are you familiar with arxiv.org? It’s a site used by the physics and mathematics communities to issue preprints of papers, so they can be checked for errors before going to submission. It’s perfectly acceptable for a paper to appear on arxiv.org and then be accepted by a major publication, such as Nature. Preprints of unusually good papers on arxiv.org normally generate such a buzz that it actually increases the circulation for whoever finally prints it.

Why would a similar system not work for classics?

Looking at it from the publisher’s view, these people have to stay in business, they’re not charities, and if the likely print run is small then I can see why they wouldn’t want an online version undercutting them at $0.00.

In fiction at least, it’s almost impossible to dissociate electronic from paper rights. Random House even recently issued a letter to their authors saying that they considered all previous contracts to include electronic rights even if they weren’t specifically mentioned! Whether that would stand up to a legal challenge I don’t know, but it shows how much electronic rights worry major publishers.

http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Author_addenda

More and more scholars are refusing to work with publishes who do not grant such rights to authorize open access back to authors. More and more (especially governmental) granting agencies, and university faculties are mandating open access to the results of scholarly resources conducted under their auspices. These mandates are clearly at odds with publishers who do not explicitly allow OA.