The Preemptive Publisher « The Scholarly Kitchen

" The supreme example of this is arXiv. How in the world did the physics publishers get beaten to the punch on a simple preprint-sharing service? Creating such a service would not have been hard to do. Especially ironic is the fact that the publishers themselves were in a privileged position to hear the complaints that authors had about the traditional publishing system, especially the long delay between the submission of an article and its publication, one of the key motivators for building arXiv. Was Paul Ginsparg the only person on the planet at that time who knew how to use a computer? We can stack up other examples of services that could very well have been conceived of by publishers, but instead were put together by others, who did not necessarily operate with publishers’ interests at heart. Book digitization was something that librarians wanted for years. Did no publisher hear what librarians were saying? It should not have taken Google to come along to get this project started. Or Creative Commons: here is a way to streamline the cumbersome rights and permissions process, which I would think that even the most beady-eyed publishing accountant would agree is a great idea, but it took an academic lawyer (and no friend of copyright), supported by philanthropies, to get this moving. Or there is the orphan works situation, which is silly. Here are books without commercial significance (otherwise they would not have gone out of print), but rather than come up with a practical solution to this, publishers have allowed the cause of orphan works to be taken up by groups who see it as a way to overturn the entire copyright regime. This list could go on and on....Moving an enterprise forward — if you must be a target, be a moving target — is the best defense. The next time you see a presentation of a gee-whiz new technical service, let it be yours...."