Well in physics it used to be like this, with most journals denying the authors the right to publish a pre-print because it would "spoil" the publication in the

Well in physics it used to be like this, with most journals denying the authors the right to publish a pre-print because it would "spoil" the publication in the journal. Some interdisciplinary journals like Science and Nature still enforce this (harmful) policy but many others were already forced to open up by the scientific community, which really accelerated the dissemination of important results a lot. After all, with most journals it takes between six to twelve months to get something published, by then most results are "yesterday's news" already ;)