"Data wants to be free and should be" has been the rallying cry of software pirates since I've been in high school. It might have struck a nerve in a group of p

"Data wants to be free and should be" has been the rallying cry of software pirates since I've been in high school. It might have struck a nerve in a group of people who make money off of the sale of software. I'm not discounting how valuable open research is to society as a whole. I'm not even arguing that, as a moral right, the research should be freely available! I'm just not seeing a technical path there that doesn't retroactively unassign publishing rights to all past papers. And I don't see how a change in political administration makes it any easier to convince rich people to give up money. I'm not even convinced the government should take action here - CS work is done on arxiv, so it's not even as if Elsevier provides a useful service in distribution. Why are authors continuing to publish in Nature when they could put a PDF up anywhere? that's what we need to address.