I can understand the desire of some authors to pay for their publications to be held by a commercial publisher, and I can understand why some people want to pay for a subscription to large amounts of scientific literature. What I CANNOT understand is why people think that copyright assignment to the commercial publisher should be a requirement for electronic archiving, indexing, and distribution. I regard my scientific publications as something that I am willing to put some work into, and I think anything that inhibits the free dissemination of scientific literature is counter to the human intent of doing research.