[houshuang]

An important thing to remember, is that many journals already permit self-archiving of publications (ie. uploading a pre-print to a personal server or an institutional repository). In fact, about 70% of large publishers automatically allow some form of self-archiving, and for the others, many have been successful including a copyright addendum with the copyright-transfer document, retaining some rights (http://scholars.sciencecommons.org/). FAQ on self-archiving (http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/).

At my university, we keep running workshops, there are student staff in the library willing to help upload articles to the repository if you just e-mail them, etc, but still, most academics won't take the five minutes to do this, even if they have the right.

This doesn't mean that the academic publishing system shouldn't change, it absolutely should. And there's also a lot of value in "liberating" academic publications that would otherwise not be free. But I hope people would become more aware of what is already possible, and legal!

[streptomycin]

Agreed, a lot of people don't know their current rights. One major reason is because that information is typically buried in some unintuitive legalese deep in some publisher's website. To work around that problem... this is a very useful database that will allow you to easily check what a journal/publisher allows you to do with your publications: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

Most in my field at least allow you to put postprints (the final version of the paper, but not formatted by the journal's typesetters) online, although there are a few stragglers who don't let you do anything.