Should publishers' priority be to enable access to journal articles or to defend against piracy?
What is it about?
Publishers have a poor reputation for a variety of reasons. One is that accessing journal articles can be difficult, even for a legitimate user. Access is easy when on campus, but far too complicated when accessing from home, Starbucks or the like. Happily, publishers have a solution in progress to the problem of off-campus access, in the form of the RA21 initiative. The paper argues that publishers should do everything they can to make accessing content easier, and that they should be less preoccupied with defencing against illegitimate access. Fighting piracy through the courts generally doesn't solve the problem. The answer is to make access to digital content simpler.
Why is it important?
The article highlighted that attempts to control piracy through legal action have tended to be ineffective. The attendant publicity fuels usage of the pirate version, and even if pirate sites are closed down, they will pop up elsewhere.