"It also could mean that the market is broken" There are four barriers to entry: 1) acquire the possible publications, 2) determine if it's in the public domai

"It also could mean that the market is broken" There are four barriers to entry: 1) acquire the possible publications, 2) determine if it's in the public domain, and 3) face likely legal action design to suck away time and money, 4) come up with a good revenue model. 1) isn't easy because access to the the newest publications require a user agreement. I think it can be done by starting with SciHub since SciHub hasn't signed an agreement in the first place. For older publications, paper scans are possible, but also expensive. 2) is easiest in those rare cases where the paper says "this paper was authored by an employee of the United States and is not subject to copyright", or something similar. Otherwise, it might be inferred from the author's institutional affiliation ("William J. Wiswesser, US. Department of Agriculture, Frederick, Maryland 21701" to pull an example from one paper in my collection). This is labor intensive and therefore expensive. 3) While the US doesn't recognize a "sweat of the brow" doctrine, other place might. Even if a public domain archive were legal, it could be sued for, say, knowingly trying to subvert the policies in #1. (Also, will these documents have the same DOI as what the publisher uses? Might they sue for copying that in violation of some user agreement on their web site?) 4) Yeah, I've no clue how to make money off of this. Especially if SciHub is part of the competition. "for example from their authors" Wiswesser, above, died in 1989. I'm going through a lot of historical papers these days.