People regularly don’t respond to those emails. For older publications it might be hard to even find the email.
In the UK, you can order a photocopy of any journal paper via inter library loans. These often come from the British library, which has everything. I’d assume elsewhere similar solutions exist.
Spending money on automating that process, and you might put most journals out of business.
"In the UK, you can order a photocopy of any journal paper via inter library loans. These often come from the British library, which has everything. I’d assume elsewhere similar solutions exist."
I'm sure I saw a device called a scanner somewhere. It seemed to transcend the worlds of paper and electronics.
I'm also from the UK and am old enough to remember life before "Brentrance" (newly minted term by me - meaning should be obvious) This issue of publication freedom is way more important or at least comparable, to Brexit in my opinion.
I'm not too sure what the perfect knowledgebase would look like but it probably is not the current one. For me it might be something like a curated MediaWiki (the software behind WikiPedia) - for me the killer feature is that an article in a wiki is just text and a few formatting hints. Text is first, formatting and other distractions come second.
I studied Civil Engineering in the UK around 1990ish. We had lots of closed off sources and refs (ISIS and others - from memory) - rubbish!
I've heard of many scenarios where the author loses access to their own paper. After moving on from a project it's easy to leave stuff on a school's server or on some hard drive in a closet.
It is slower and less convenient, but maybe not $10 million a year less convenient...