Would some variation of: "I run an online library of scientific material, and I've just received a large donation of physical papers. I want to scan and upload them, but I don't know whether or not it's legal for me to do so. They are copyrighted, but certain exemptions seem to exist in copyright law for fair use, etc. What are my options and potential liability?" work?
One problem is that even if you buy a physical printed paper, directly from the publisher, and you scan it - just for your own storage and reference purposes (not to share with anyone else) - then you have already infringed mechanical copyright. When purchasing a paper (or, back in the day, a piece of music on a vinyl record) you do not have the "rights" to copy and transform the text into another physical form.
In practice, of course, most of us used to buy records to play at home, and then record them onto cassette tape to play in the car. We also made copies for friends. We also taped stuff off the radio. It was impossible to stop - and yet (in the UK, at least) the Record Industry tried...
Note that under the UK version of copyright law, there is no such concept as "fair use", as there is in the US version. This complicates things when the information is transferred across national boundaries - as we now do every day, via the internet.
The sharing of academic papers has always happened, and (arguably) science would grind to a halt if all researchers always had to comply with the letter of copyright law, and pay publishers whatever they demand for every single copy of every paper we wish to look at.
(Anecdote time) About 25 years ago, when starting some part-time research at the University of Manchester, my supervisor thought nothing of running a large stack of papers through the photocopier for me to take away and peruse. This sort of thing happened everywhere, and I'm sure many people here will have experienced the same. A couple of years later, some academic publishers took the same University to court - and managed to impose a huge fine on them for photocopying papers without paying licence fees. It was done as a test case - to scare all the other universities into complying with the publishers' demands (and it worked).
Nowadays, of course, university staff, researchers, and students access papers electronically - but copyright law, and legal threats, mean that each university has to pay eye-watering annual fees to publishers for the privilege.
Sharing papers between friends still happens, but that is mostly because it either flies under the radar of the publishers, or they decide that it isn't worth pursuing some infringers - as long as it doesn't affect their profits too much.
But if the infringement becomes too well known, they will not hesitate to use the courts to close it down. That happened with the Z-Library archive last year, which had been used, quietly, by many people for years - until Tik-Tok users heard about it and started making videos telling everyone. The publishers then made sure that the main domains got shut down.
