[Panurge]

I just ran across your post from several months ago. The scientific community caught on to this very soon because it had been using computers and the Internet routinely for much longer than others in the academic world.
There's another side to this business, however, and I thought that as a librarian I might point it out.
In the humanities most scholarly publication is subsidized by the universities themselves in the form of free editorial labor and academic presses, which are expected to break even but not necessarily to turn a profit.
Around the beginning of the 20th century, the scientific community elected to consign its scholarly journals to trade publishers. As a result, those journals are incredibly expensive, because commercial publishers do want to make a profit. By 2000 it was clear that the whole enterprise was getting out of hand; furthermore, many of the scientific papers published in the official journals were delayed more and more and made less and less useful to those who needed to read them. As a result, scientists started posting drafts of their articles on the Internet while they waited for the journals to get around to distributing them in printed volumes. Right now there is a full-scale revolt and a call to abandon the trade publishers altogether. It's an interesting phenomenon, and those of us stuck in the transitional stages of this shift in scholarly publishing often have to make difficult decisions about budgets and storage. That is exactly where I am right now. I am putting an enormous group of scientific journals--all of which are now available online--into storage. The question is how long can we afford to keep them at all.
Transitions are never easy; this one is a dilly. I'm on the side of the electronic version (obviously, or I wouldn't be writing this), but that doesn't ease my responsibility towards making sure we don't act precipitously in the meantime.