The standard argument for copyright is to incentivize the creation of new works, but academic authors are paid by their respective institutions to produce research and distribute it to the world.

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He theorized that just as the credibility of an academic work is often weighted by the number and diversity of other works it cites, the importance of any given Web page could also be determined by the number of other pages to which it is linked.

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Many of them are put off by the way the academic promotion system works, explains Lotte Bailyn, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management.

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Semi-hidden at Odins among lush Art Nouveau lamps and mirrors, portraits of Edwardian society beauties and academic landscapes, are works by Messrs Proctor, Kitaj and Hockney.

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The prizing-winning 81-year-old author and academic has written more than 20 works - some fiercely critical of politicians and a failure of leadership in Nigeria.

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Prof Fabre, an academic at King's College London who works on the rejection of organs, and Conservative Montgomeryshire MP Glyn Davies have proposed a national donor and transplant day.

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Davies was awarded many academic honours, and the lectures he gave on those occasions were small works of art, worked at and worried over for weeks.

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Some have been set up by academics who are unhappy with the way academic publishing works. (Since January some 9, 500 researchers have joined a boycott of Elsevier.) In several cases the entire editorial boards of existing journals have resigned to start new ones with lower prices and less restricted access.

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Ask anyone who works in the research department of a large pharmaceutical company tasked with developing drugs based on papers published by academic scientists.

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