The idea you suggest in your second comment here—that I gather together a like-minded group of scholars who work to organize our own “imprint”—is pretty much exactly what I’m after.  Yes, it would be a tremendous amount of work, but I also think that the service that it would provide to the scholarly community could be comparably large.

This is the direction I’m hoping to move my thinking—what exactly needs to be done in order to invent such a new imprint, who needs to be brought on board, what the publications of such an imprint might look like, and how to mitigate the apparent “downsides” of not having an already-established university press imprimatur.

Thinking further about this, Kathleen: what’s to stop you and a few like minds in your field/discipline from starting your own ‘imprint’? Form your own editorial board, choose a domain name, set up an official-looking site, and seek submissions, which you then farm out to reviewers. Then you can either publish them on your site, or bestow some kind of imprimatur which the authors can attach to works published on their own site. This is how learned societies start, or many journals start: out of the efforts of a few.

As an outsider to your discipline, it seems to me that you already have a bunch of like minds gathered around in a loose blogging network who might be open to serving on such an editorial board and acting as reviewers. Why not give it a try?

(It’s not fair of me to suggest what is obviously a large amount of work that only others can do, but what can I do, I’m not an English/Cultural Studies scholar.)

But you’re right, there’s a need for something more; I wasn’t trying to suggest that pure vanity publishing is the way to go (the examples in that first comment of mine were of papers I’d already published or had no plans to publish). Rather, by writing and reading online in this informal way, groups of peers can get to know each other, judge each other’s ideas, and form collective judgements about what is a valuable contribution to their field and what isn’t; and from that position might more easily create an ‘imprint-effect’ of some kind. But that requires online activity by a reasonable number of academics in every field, not just a few.