They have almost all the assets. It's good trying to put pressure on them, because they've been abusing their position for too long, but if you can't access legally decades of references you and your institution have this problem that you can't work. Besides, if you get copies elsewhere you are liable and they can throw the copyright laws at you and win. This can only be solved with a new legal framework for IP (good luck with that) or ad hoc laws, they can't be forced to give up the golden eggs goose otherwise and they know it.
In the meantime, it would be nice if everybody uploaded their reviewed papers to arXiv. No one should have to pay for new content already been paid by the taxpayers.
IIRC it won't be that easy in germany. Copyright is non-transferable so Elsevier has a license. Additionally we have the Verwertungsrecht, which is part of the non-transferabl part of the copyright law and gives the author of a work the exclusive and inalienable right to publish, copy and transmit their work as they see fit.
In Germany, there stands nothing in the way of all the professors and students simply republishing their work elsewhere and Elsevier could not nothing about it.
What they can't do is publish copies of works that Elsevier has edited (significantly). So if Elsevier contributed to the document then the editor as Elsevier and by proxy Elsevier has the copyright on those parts IF they are significant enough (significant is a huge burden of proof here, spelling mistakes being corrected don't count).
That's very good news, yet I imagine the publisher can claim rights over composition, layout, typesetting and the pdfs themselves. This is quite a problem as who's going to do all that again, particularly when it comes to dead authors (ocr won't cut it). Nowadays you have your own digital version and you could simply distribute that (if we ignore keeping track of published page numbers), but what you get for papers up to more or less the 90s is scanned documents, it's unlikely that you can find other versions around. The transition to a sane model won't be frictionless nor fast, it might be cheaper to make a bid for the publishing companies outright (fees of subscriptions are simply absurd, their whole business model is a legal racket).
For dead authors, the inheritance regulates who gets to control the copyright. Usually inheritance works out, the state puts a lot of money into finding lost relatives if everything else fails.
The publisher to my knowledge cannot claim copyright over composition, layout, typesetting or the PDF unless they can show they had significant copyrightable work in each step. (Copyright in Germany first requires you to do some significant intellectual work, where significant changes based on what you do but science usually has a higher barrier)
If the PDF contains a trademark of theirs then that's a problem.
Generally a pre-print PDF should be available in almost all cases and could be published without Elsevier's input. If not that, Universities do archive the Tex files (or similar inputs) if possible so they could take those.
They may have all past assets, but in the absence of agreement and Elsevier's reputation for not dealing fairly, people are going elsewhere and will continue to do this in in greater numbers.
I think Elsevier can achieve temporary stalemate at best.
you can still access the old articles, university libraries usually have the paper editions and cancelling the subscription does not disallow anyone from using the paper editions they once bought.
Those were the days, but going back to photocopy world won't be very good for productivity and maybe the quality of research. Being able to check everything easily is an incredible advantage. And then there's this problem of disappearing or lost issues that some might remember fondly. Quite frankly, if it comes to this everybody will get pirated copies or ask a colleague for theirs. I love paper though, a few things exist solely on it (and maybe they are in another country, how much better digital copies are cannot be overstated).
I don't doubt people will get pirated copies instead of using the paper versions, but the existence of the paper versions allows them to pretend they read the paper in a legit way. I'm not taking sides for that sort of behaviour or against it, just that I expect that will be the workflow.
Nobody has to pretend to have read articles in a legitimate way; a researcher only has to be able to give a legitimate citation for the article. Citations should be sufficient for other researchers to find the article in question and BibTeX data is easy to find for most published work. I frequently google the title, authors, and sometimes year (if there are multiple versions from different years) and download a PDF from wherever (rarely the official publisher, because logging in is too difficult), and then just find BibTeX data as needed when I am writing a paper.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2018/j...