Every scientist understands the importance of the scientific literature.
Society spends tens of billions of dollars a year to support basic scientific research, and scientists around the world devote hundreds of millions of hours a year to research and discovery. It can reasonably be argued that the principal product of all this investment and creative activity and hard work is the world's archive of scientific literature - the only permanent record of our ideas, experimental results and discoveries, and those of our colleagues and predecessors. By any objective standard it seems absurd that publishers should 'own' the scientific literature as their private property. Journals play an important role in producing finished scientific manuscripts - they manage peer review and the editorial process. But the creativity, intellectual content and labour contributed by the publishers is minuscule in comparison to the contributions of the scientists who provide the original ideas, conduct the work, write the papers and actually carry out the peer review by serving as reviewers.