I watched "The Internet's Own Boy" about Aaron Swartz a few
days ago.  Wonderful motivation: make academic literature
publically accessable.  Stupid juvenile implementation:
download a million papers from JSTOR in an MIT wiring
closet.  Horrible outcome: Federal prosecution, suicide.

I'll let others march in the streets and demand free ice
cream and ponies.  I hope that works, but I wouldn't bet
on it.

I want to make the information contained in academic
literature publically accessable ... and versioned, and
updated, and weblinked, and supported.  The academics
here might have some ideas.

What if:  We (meaning those more capable than me) construct
a software environment for disassembing the pdf elements of
an academic paper, which a moderately literate person can
use to REWRITE and redraw and reformat the paper as a
substantially different work with an updated version of
the same information in it?  I am inspired by some of the
capabilities in Inkscape for reworking graphics into SVG.

What if we improve that process, for example tying a graph
in an old paper to data from new research that verifies,
refines, or refutes it?  Move the slider on the graph from
an original 1960 paper to a new graph that incorporates
2017 data?

I have about a dozen published journal papers out there
(one with over 200 citations) that I would love to
"de-copyright" out of the clutches of the IEEE, Elsevier,
etc.  My newest stuff is publically posted as pre-
publication drafts before I submit it, but I would love
simple tools that would ease the process of liberating
my older work.  I'd be glad to help as an alpha-test
guinea pig, also use the tool for new writing projects.

There are other papers by other authors, some long since
dead, that I would love to apply the same treatment to,
so I can cite the liberated version in my open version.

At the end of the rewrite process, the tool can compare
the original and the liberated versions and estimate
the legally actionable overlap, which a creative-commons
community can continue to rework until the overlap is
zero, and also re-rework if legal threats or court
decisions add new restrictions to work around.

I expect the Big Content owners will attempt to enact
legislation to forbid the process, but I believe we can
rewrite code and evade restrictions faster than they
can write and pass legislation.  If they are panicky
in their legislative responses, we can probably trick
them into passing laws against their own practices.

95% of the work out there is obscure, and the world
does not need a rewrite.  If 10 million (WAG) academic
papers have ever been written, that might mean 500,000
to be processed.  That would be a lot more work than
went into wikipedia, but a lot fewer hours than all
US citizens waste on TV in a year.  It might take a 
few decades, but a small subset of the world's thinkers
could eventually get this done, and incorporate the
process into the training of new scholars.

Hopefully, the tools that we write will become the go-to
tools for the creation of new works, a dual path process
for authors that produces both a terse, stylized version
that the JSTORs and Elseviers of the world can greedily
guard and sell ...

... and an open, updatable, friendly version of the
document that 99% of the world will actually use. 
Personally, I would love it if my best papers outlived
me by centuries, steadily improving and accumulating
hundreds of coauthors into the far future.

While this would be a very complicated suite of tools to
write, it's gotta be a lot easier than designing rockets
and self-driving cars.

Am I nuts?

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          [log in to unmask]