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 ...)

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.

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

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.)

"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.

What Elsevier does should be illegal. Giving up your copyright to make those pirates rich is the worst idea, anyway.

> What Elsevier does should be illegal.

So you lobby for an abolishment of the copyright laws - interesting idea...

Indeed: It is quite impossible to claim that "what Elsevier does should be illegal" and not standing up for an abolishment of the existing copyright laws.

On the other hand: The copyleft free software licenses currently only work because of the copyright laws. Keep that in mind...

As you can see, your simple statement has deep consequences. I personally rather think, what many academics do, should be illegal. Here the consequences are far less radical...

> So you lobby for an abolishment of the copyright laws

EDIT: to agree and amplify your comment:

In this case the copyright is dubious in the first place. Authors who work with public money should not have exclusive copyrights of the work they produce within this arrangement.

That is why I wrote "I personally rather think, what many academics do, should be illegal.".