Remember that the TPP will enact new laws and penalties related to copyright, affecting 800 million people. First they came for the librarians... Unless there is public opposition, the TPP will likely be voted into effect during the US post-election lame duck period. Instead, the TPP can be made into a visible 2016 election issue, to forestall post-election flip-flops.
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.
One thing to do is to improve peer-2-peer technology , that it will be fit for the task.To do this we'll need a few things :
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.
I don't know. like i mention in the link of the previous discussion - At least for this goal - Tribler seems to be mostly there including being part of the huge torrent community, it's written in python - so it's seem like it could easily do the job - so why complicate things at this stage which should be about and MVP and building a community ?
Inertia, mostly. If you want your research visible and you want mad street cred for tenure, you publish in the biggest and baddest journals. The biggest and baddest journals are the biggest and baddest because they've been around since the days when scientists would go the university library to read papers.
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* There are not that many open journals around (see e.g. [1], probably slightly outdated); plus the throughput of a journal is generally low (the linked journal ToC has published 20 articles in 2015).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.
Inertia, but also it is convenient for funding commities and electoral bodies. It removes the burden of having to review the actual scientists, since they can rely on "where they publish". This is just as flawed as it sounds, and IMHO has led to a lot of dubious science in the life sciences.
How hard is it to nullify a publisher's copyright claim (which has been consented by the authors), based on the fact that they do none of the work, thus indirectly appropriating public money?
I'm proud to have done something similar to this. I knew I was going to have to sign over the publication rights to my dissertation. Before I did that, I published the approved, and signed off "final draft" to the Internet Archive with an open license. (I hadn't heard of Aaron or the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto at the time.)
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...
> So you lobby for an abolishment of the copyright laws
EDIT: to agree and amplify your comment:
In this case the copyright is dubious in the first place. Authors who work with public money should not have exclusive copyrights of the work they produce within this arrangement.
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...