Very few authors are in a powerful position to bargain with publishers over contract provisions. We are not likely to get very far in cutting publishers' power by encouraging authors to make tougher bargains with them. The publishers have all the chips. Our problem is that publishers are in the position of power not only in relationships with authors, but also in relationships with libraries. The first is natural, the second is because librarians have not exercized the power they have.
Libraries are the money cow that drives the whole system.
Librarians have failed to recognize and use their power, because they are still living in a world that changed twenty years ago. That is when commercial publishers began to realize that libraries consitute a very inelastic market. But libraries have. We still imagine ourselves to be part of a scholarly information dissemination network, a kind of socialistic combination of efforts of scientists, publishers, libraries, and readers, dedicated to the advance of knowledge. That network still operates, but publishers discovered how much profit can be wrung from the system at our expense.