Academics tend to look down at issues of
copyright and ignore their implications.

As a consequence, as a community, they
make mistakes that can prove very costly.

The most obvious example of these mistakes
is with scientific publishing of papers.

Let's look at the submission process 
for a paper in a mathematics journal.

After I write that paper, my submission
will follow the peer review process.

A couple of other mathematicians 
will look at it to give a referee report,

and a journal editor will decide to accept it
or not, based on those reports.

Neither the referees or the journal editor
will be paid very much for this.

If my paper gets accepted, most of the
time,

I have to cede copyright to the journal, 
I have to sign a contract.

Then the paper gets published, 
university libraries around the world,

including my own,

that of the referees or the editor will
buy a copy of the journal.

I can't get it directly to them, 
or all the other universities

because I don't own 
the copyright anymore.

Because of this dominating position 
of publishers

-- the owners of journals -- 
most subscriptions are very expensive

and charge a price that does not reflect 
the value added by the publisher.

In fact, there is little work done 
by the publisher in mathematics.

The state of the paper at the moment of
submission is very close, visually,

to the state at the moment of publication,

because we are already using similar tools
to edit formulas, as book copy editors.

So in the end, the mathematics community
pays publishers a lot of money

for buying back their own work.

It's a crazy system, 
but one that has evolved

because academics 
did not pay attention

and let their most prestigious brands, 
the historically most prestigious journals

be bought by big 
publishing companies.

[CC BY-SA
Paul Olivier Dehaye]