And they also bring up a point about scientific papers being biased towards “positive” results, this is probably true of authors as well, who probably dont want to publish “negative” results.

A good thought exercise is this: what should Microsoft buy to prevent an erosion of its operating systems and office software businesses? What should Apple do to keep up its music business? Or if you think it’s too late for these dinosaurs, what should Google buy to prevent an erosion of its core advertising business? When should newspapers have been worried about losing classified ads to eBay and Craigslist and who should they have bought for how much?

Or to finish with a relevant academic example, what should traditional academic publishers like Wiley or Elsevier do now in the face of self-hosted open-access journals like the Journal of Machine Learning Research? What they’re actually doing is twofold. One is moving to author-based payment, such as teh $2650 Oxford University Press would charge us to publish in one of their journals:

http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/nar/announce_openaccess.html

The publishers are also lobbying congress to remove the law that says all content funded by NIH needs to be open source and block any such moves the government might make in the future:

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/911/1

It’s a typical defend-your-existing-business move.