The production, circulation, consumption and ownership of scientific knowledge: historical perspectives

Who owns the content of scientific research papers, and who has the right to circulate them? This CREATe Working Paper by Aileen Fyfe uses the history of academic publishing to explore the origins of our modern concerns in terms of claim to ownership, circulation reprinting and reuse of material during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It ends by considering how things changed in the twentieth century, as commercial interests became increasingly influential in academic publishing and as new technologies brought new opportunities for circulating knowledge.