[DannyBee]

It's not possible in the US. If the authors validly transferred copyright, they validly transferred copyright.

(There is a takeback provision after 50 years or so, but ...)

[dredmorbius]

Anything is renegotiable or litigable.

Schools and academics can drop subscriptions or boycott submissions. Law can be changed.

Even if that's future-looking only, it can change the balance of interests for journal publishers.

[DannyBee]

"Anything is renegotiable or litigable."

Actually not. This would be likely dismissed before a hearing was held.

In any case, what was asked was whether there is a snowball's chance of hell of nullifying a copyright claim. The answer here is "no".

Good luck trying to change copyright though. I spent about 7 years in DC working on copyright and patent reform. It's very lonely.

[wolfgke]

Or you can show civil disobedience:

  > https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt
  > https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto

If lots of people would do it, there can only few show trials be initialized by the publishers.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mahatma Gandhi

[metasean]

I'm proud to have done something similar to this. I knew I was going to have to sign over the publication rights to my dissertation. Before I did that, I published the approved, and signed off "final draft" to the Internet Archive with an open license. (I hadn't heard of Aaron or the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto at the time.)