The US Copyright Office has a progressive report [1] on Orphan Works, a positive example of practical steps negotiated among a wide range of business and civil society stakeholders. This example can be expanded to other areas of copyright law. Instead, the TPP favors a subset [2] of corporate interests, at the expense of competing corporate and public groups who were excluded from deliberations. We can do better.
[1] http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/how-tpp-will-affect-yo...
I wonder, apart from financies, how can we support their efforts?
1. Torrents(as the most proven tech) should be able to handle storage of rare file (i.e. persistence) well[a].
2. A working peer to peer search mechanism - i believe tribler has that. It might need some customization for academic papers - but it's written in python , so it won't be terribly hard.
3. Tribler has mechanisms for anonymity and against censorship. One more thing that should be added is a secure pdf reader - maybe pdf.js via chrome is the most secure we have today.
4. Maybe there would be a need for some spam protection.
[a]search for 'bad for storing "rare" files' in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253
I agree with inertia, but I want to add a few more details from experience that could shed a bit more light onto it:
* There are not that many open journals around (see e.g. [1], probably slightly outdated); plus the throughput of a journal is generally low (the linked journal ToC has published 20 articles in 2015).
* Graduate students often want to maximize the impact of the journal they're submitting it to simply because the work itself is say of medium importance to the field.
* The review process takes a lot of time, it can even take more than 100 days. This encourages the researcher into trying as few journals as possible, which benefits the more impacted, more numerous closed journals.
* At least at my university neither the administration nor the school library promote open journals in any significant way. Which is strange, seeing as they are the ones paying the journal subscription fees.
https://blockchain.info/address/14ghuGKDAPdEcUQN4zuzGwBUrhQg...
(There is a takeback provision after 50 years or so, but ...)
Schools and academics can drop subscriptions or boycott submissions. Law can be changed.
Even if that's future-looking only, it can change the balance of interests for journal publishers.
So you lobby for an abolishment of the copyright laws - interesting idea...
Indeed: It is quite impossible to claim that "what Elsevier does should be illegal" and not standing up for an abolishment of the existing copyright laws.
On the other hand: The copyleft free software licenses currently only work because of the copyright laws. Keep that in mind...
As you can see, your simple statement has deep consequences. I personally rather think, what many academics do, should be illegal. Here the consequences are far less radical...
