So what's the endgame here? Drive Elsevier out of business? Watch as its hundreds of journals (some great, some not so great) vanish? What happens to the zillions of papers in existence in those journals, currently available from their website with a few clicks? (What does happen to the copyright holdings of an entity that goes out of business?)
The journals would not vanish if the publisher went bankrupt. Their back issues would become accessible through Portico (http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/), which exists precisely for that purpose.
The endgame is ensuring that everyone has access to scientific research. Whether or not the publishers continue to be in business is not relevant, as long as we are able to wrest away the literature which they are holding hostage.
If Reed Elsevier went out of business (very unlikely because it doesn't just do academic publishing, it also does publishing in other small but lucrative niches), it would make room for some great open-access journals. The same people and institutions who write the current journals would still be involved, their libraries would work more efficiently at a fraction of the cost, and there would be at least one universally available public library indexing and archiving the open-access work.
The digital library wouldn't vanish even if Elsevier filed for bankruptcy. But even imagining some James Bond villain destroying all copies, the journals would be digitised again from library copies, possibly something like the Google Books initiative. The libraries wouldn't fall twice for a partnership with a cartel creating newly exclusive rights.
The authors of the papers are also copyright holders.I believe this is worth pointing out: Elsevier is not offering some irreplaceable service by having a web server. Their value mostly lies in setting up the journal review teams and process, and making sure they live up to their standards.
Negative. To publish in an Elsevier journal you must sign away your copyright. The authors do NOT hold copyright. And that's part of why the situation is so ridiculous and urgently needs to be fixed.
the right to post a pre-print version of the journal article on Internet websites including electronic pre-print servers, and to retain indefinitely such version on such servers or sites for scholarly purposes (with some exceptions such as The Lancet and Cell Press. See also our information on electronic preprints for a more detailed discussion on these points)*
Unfortunately, that excludes some of their best publications.
High-quality Open-access Peer-reviewed journal that takes less than a year to get review and published is already in place (e.g., http://www.josis.org/index.php/josis). As a matter of fact, the academic community loves it.
