In 1942, the US Book Republication Program permitted American publishers
to reprint “exact reproductions” of Germany’s scientific texts without
payment; seventy-five years later, the fate of this scientific knowledge
forms the basis of a “natural experiment” analysed by Barbara Biasi and
Petra Moser for The Center for Economic and Policy Research, who
compare the fate of these texts to their contemporaries who didn’t have
this semi-public-domain existence.
Here’s the headline finding: “This artificial removal of copyright
barriers led to a 25% decline in prices, and a 67% increase in
citations. These results suggest that restrictive copyright policies
slow down the progress of science considerably.”
