Although the products publishers offer are books and journals and such, their greatest asset is, as the headline suggests, control of the scholarly record. This is why they are so concerned to define what counts as 'scholarly' as 'what is published by scholarly publishers'. But this control is being challenged. This article focuses on two specific areas: academic preprints, and research data. To control the scholarly record, publishers will need to control these; conversely, if they lose control of these, they risk losing their greatest asset. Obviously my view is that publisher control over preprints and data would be bad, but the wider perspective here is that this will have to be an area of renewed focus for publishers, and hence, for the people who produce and use preprints and research data.
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