Doctrine

Romain David BOURDON, Sacha ROUAH

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Résumé

Researchers rely on their peers’ reflections when seeking to add their contribution to the edifice of knowledge: publications by scholars inspire others’ work. Within the scientific community, publishers position themselves as essential intermediaries between researchers, who are simultaneously authors, publishing work in academic journals, and readers of their colleagues’ publications. However, as Professor Antoine Latreille comments, researchers have an ambivalent and almost “schizophrenic” relationship with intellectual property, torn between a desire to protect their own output and their assertions of entitlement to access and utilise others’ scientific work freely. In legal terms, Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights crystallizes this ambivalence into a “balanced formulation of ideal access to knowledge”.

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