If information is of no commercial value there is nothing to be gained in keeping it. This role of preservation is one that has traditionally been played by libraries. Academics need to be able to track through the available literature. This is very difficult on the Internet as URLs regularly disappear and cannot be maintained over time. Publishers cannot have a long term view.
Universities are institutions which change very slowly and are ideal repositories of information.
Derek summed up by restating that publishers are making a great deal of money out of scholarly communication. Their structures and aims and objectives are fundamentally opposed to those of the scholarly community. He started his publishing career writing and editing articles on earth science topics for a general encyclopaedia, while whiling away spare time, of which there was a fair amount at sea. After three and a half years, the sea lost its appeal and he joined Elsevier, then just one of a group of relatively small science publishers. In an attempt to bolster his general management skills, he joined a newspaper group in The Netherlands, taking charge as Managing Director of one of the smaller dailies, but the call of science publishing and the promise of an innovative environment at Academic Press proved too hard to resist and he has been in the position of Managing Director of AP's UK operation for just over 5 years now.