Abolishing copyright on "academic works" would not be a simple legal change.
First, "academic works" would have to be defined. Currently, there's no legal definition for peer-reviewed academic works; any group can start up an academic journal, and announce "we are qualified because of X, Y & Z to present expert papers on our topic of choice." Changing the laws so that all such journals would also have to announce, "submissions we publish immediately enter the public domain, and anyone can reprint them at a profit," would substantially alter who is willing to submit.
Anyone who thinks his academic research might be a good book topic would refrain from journal publication. Except that the paper seems to think those books would also be in the public domain--that all academic
content would be exempt from copyright. I cannot imagine what nightmare of definitions games would result from an attempt to promote this idea in a legal venue.
I haven't finished reading the paper, but it seems to consider copyright-of-academic-works in a vacuum, without regard to the larger copyright world in which
everything else is protected by copyright law.
The author seems to have some misunderstandings about copyright.
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Moreover, copyright protection is significantly incomplete for articles. Journals are increasingly allowing free downloading of their articles from the Internet, at least after a window of time following publication.
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It implies that a journal that permits copies is failing to protect them to the full extent copyright law allows--as if copyright law's only purpose were to prevent free copies.
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Books seem to enjoy greater effective copyright protection than articles. Academic books published under copyright today are not usually available in electronic form, even though publishing practices are changing.
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And the author doesn't acknowledge the existence of Creative Commons--in one place, it mentions "Open access journals generally do not copyright their works," and gives as an example the Public Library of Science. But its website is under a
CC 2.5 Attribution license.
I intend to read it completely, but with so many errors in its assumptions about copyright, I'm not expecing to be wow'd by the conclusions.