Jon Knight responds to Charles Oppenheims Legal Issues associated with Electronic Copyright Management Systems article.
Publishers provide a means of controlling the information explosion by maintaining quality.
By-passing them will be a serious step with implications for bibliographic control and the quality of research. There is already a delicate and tense relationship between data owners and data users. Sure, some journals are well respected, quality, peer reviewed publications but there are well respected, quality, peer reviewed web pages and there are also unrespected, low quality, sometimes peer reviewed paper journals published. Just because something has a publisher doesn't mean its worth reading. In the long run you judge the usefulness of a publication based on your experience with it.