On Sun, Apr 09, 2017 at 11:33:52PM -0400, Andrew Zyman wrote: > Have your thought about business model? > Who will pay for liberated papers and for development of > such a process/software? It would probably develop slowly, evolving out of existing open source tools, modeled on Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg. The modules would grow as various subsets of academics decide that it is cheaper to collaborate with this project than to pay for annual upgrades of Word from Microsoft. Hosting? I bet Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive) would love to do so. Which is to say, I have no idea. I am more concerned about whether we even know how to do such a thing, especially the semantic reassignment and plagiarism/copyright detection aspects. There will be legal attacks, and battles are decided by who has the most money for lawyers, so this would need IBM-scale backing to crush the mid-sized whiners. Perhaps the Saudis would like to reformat papers for their students, adding appropriate Qu'ran citations. No joke; a contractor friend went there in the 80's to modify programs so that all line printer output began with a prayer and recitation from the Qu'ran. This could be a process that would make Google's goals easier to accomplish, so perhaps they might throw a few kilodevelopers and a kilolawyer at it. After I hear from you clever people about whether this seems doable and valuable, I'll ask an IP-lawyer friend who works for Google for her off-the-record opinion. I once asked an artist for permission to redraw and reformat some of his work for an entirely different non-commercial purpose. He said "Bad artists copy; great artists STEAL. Redo my stuff, do a good job, link to my website, help commercial clients find me!" I assume academics want to be found by grant agencies. In a era of draconian copyright extension, facilitating "new" art by calling attention to non-Hollywood "art" may be difficult, but hopefully we can do so. If academic work was more available and readable, more people would read it and a few less would spend money in theaters and bookstores. That's the real threat. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [log in to unmask]