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]