How can an old research paper published before the Internet be made available online to prevent plagiarism?

Question

I want to upload a scanned copy of a research paper that isn't accessible online to demonstrate someone else's significant contribution to a field. Internet was not widely available when the study was released. I intend to upload the paper on Research Gate to make its abstract indexed by Google Scholar.

I want to do this to prevent plagiarism by researchers who know about this paper and make use of the fact that it's not in English and not easily discoverable to write their own research papers without giving credit to the original author.

Therefore, I plan to upload the paper on Research Gate to make abstract indexed by Google Scholar search engine. I do this to make it discoverable and cited. And to be able to prove that the man, whom I am trying to help, is the original author. I also intend to upload the paper on other academic search engines.

The main text of the paper is not in English, while the title and abstracts are in English but are poorly translated. My questions:

1. Is it acceptable to upload to Research Gate the scan of the original paper and attach an English translation of the main text?
2. Is it acceptable to provide a better translation of the title and abstract in the attached translation if the ones in the original paper are poorly translated?
3. Can I enter the improved translation in Research Gate field for the abstract instead of the poor one, so that it is indexed by Google Scholar search engine?

For those concerned about copyright: I am the copyright owner.

Answer 1

What you propose is covered by copyright law, both the uploading and any publishing of a translation. First determine if it is a copyrighted publication. If so, ask the publisher or other copyright holder. If not, then it is fine.

Note that copyright protections still hold on many things done before the internet. Also note that copyright law varies.

If you have no rights or license to the work, then you can reference it and work within fair use as defined in the appropriate copyright law.

Note that a paper doesn't need to be internet accessible to be cited, or even to be found.

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For your changed question: 1 is almost certainly copyright infringement, provided there is still a valid copyright held by someone else. So, no, not ethically acceptable and unlikely to be legally acceptable. 2 is probably fine under fair use. (Probably fine.) 3 is a judgement call, but you don't get to make the judgement. The copyright holder, if any, will judge that. If they disagree with the action they may take an action of their own under applicable laws. But even as much as a paragraph could be considered infringement.

Answer 2

Write a short technical note, or a review paper, or a short contribution to whatever journal relevant and related to the topic publishes them.

This way you defend your bibliographic work (you publish something in your name), you respect the original developer (you cite the pre-internet era paper), you make the link with the current practitioners (you should cite some very recent progress and/or publication) so your work may be picked up (or not, but you must do your best to reduce the effort to do so for everyone).

Otherwise it is just a +1 "fact" circulating in the internet saying "hey, ancient sailormen already knew that the Earth revolves around the Sun" without much backing nor strength and with some issues regarding copyright&intellectual property.

Ps: please note that I am not downplaying the importante of Galileo work, nor I am ignoring the fact that ancient sailormen knew the Earth was rotating around the Sun.

Ps nr. 2: when I say

but you must do your best to reduce the effort to do so for everyone

I do not mean that you have to upload your better translation and spam its URL to everyone interested, this approach would be the best effort to make everyone ignore you and the original paper.

UPDATE after your comments:

Just write a short technical document, describe briefly why the old paper is relevant, provide translations to the main points of the paper (citing it) and then publish your document on arXiv. Then you are all set, you can step into the future claiming plagiarism for what you wrote in the arXiv submission or hunting citations for the pre-internet era paper.