It's a problem in the first place that these archives are held by a private company.
Why do they keep it centuries of it by the way? Because they hold the copyrights of the articles, but isn't that supposed to dissolve at some point in time after the death of the authors?
The enormous amount of public money thrown away at publishers by each individual country is more than enough to conserve all the archives of all the published papers, past, present, and future.
If Elsevier went bankrupt, and actually even if it does not, we should have them hand over the archives so that they are taken care of by public institutions who will not put barriers around their contents.
Also, you imply that "open access publication = substandard publication", which is entirely wrong. There are countless counterexamples.
I choose my words carefully. Please read them carefully.
1. My argument was never about the quality of open-access journals. Given the choice between a closed journal and a "lesser" open-access journal, most (but not all) authors would still try to publish in the closed one. There are highly regarded open access journals. But they are comparatively few.
2. The publishers already retain the rights of hundreds of years of published papers. They will not give that away to some (governmental or otherwise) science-preservation organisation. So the only way to "safe" these results is to keep the publishers alive.
I would like the world to be different. And I would have loved to see aaron swartz "liberating" more paper archives. But that is a different story.
But I do not agree with your second point, I don't see what is the problem. Of course they won't agree! Who cares? The law could force them to hand the archive over. And if they don't, public authorities could help to enforce such a law, even if a physical intervention is necessary to take the archives of humanity's knowledge back from them.
I know this sounds "too much" for most people, but for me the current situation is not acceptable.
It's a problem in the first place that these archives are held by a private company. Why do they keep it centuries of it by the way? Because they hold the copyrights of the articles, but isn't that supposed to dissolve at some point in time after the death of the authors?
The enormous amount of public money thrown away at publishers by each individual country is more than enough to conserve all the archives of all the published papers, past, present, and future.
If Elsevier went bankrupt, and actually even if it does not, we should have them hand over the archives so that they are taken care of by public institutions who will not put barriers around their contents.
Also, you imply that "open access publication = substandard publication", which is entirely wrong. There are countless counterexamples.