That's happened in a few fields. Three CS examples I know of are, 1) the association endorsing the Journal of Logic Programming (Elsevier) withdrew endorsement in 2000, and the editorial board resigned en masse to form Theory and Practice of Logic Programming; 2) the editorial board of Machine Learning (Kluwer) resigned in 2001, moving to the newly created Journal of Machine Learning Research; and 3) the Journal of Algorithms (Elsevier) board resigned in 2003 to form Transactions on Algorithms. Donald Knuth wrote a lengthy letter that spurred that last one (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf).
I think there were a few others in that era that slip my mind. Not sure why the pace slowed down after that flurry of activity, though. Possibly effort has gone towards more institutional initiatives like PLoS, rather than the "editor revolt" style of initiative that was semi-popular in the early 2000s.
Physics and the social sciences (incl. law) seem to have partly sidestepped the access problem in practice by making centralized pre-print repositories (arXiv for physics, SSRN for social sciences) de-facto standard places to deposit preprints. Not sure why that hasn't developed in other fields, or what could be done to encourage it.
I think there were a few others in that era that slip my mind. Not sure why the pace slowed down after that flurry of activity, though. Possibly effort has gone towards more institutional initiatives like PLoS, rather than the "editor revolt" style of initiative that was semi-popular in the early 2000s.
Physics and the social sciences (incl. law) seem to have partly sidestepped the access problem in practice by making centralized pre-print repositories (arXiv for physics, SSRN for social sciences) de-facto standard places to deposit preprints. Not sure why that hasn't developed in other fields, or what could be done to encourage it.