There is a large stream of literature related to academic copyright. Nonetheless a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of the interplay between economic rights and the moral right of paternity appears to be missing. Furthermore, the impact of the commodification of research on academic copyright has not been sufficiently investigated. This essay aims precisely to fill these gaps. The main idea is the following: in the current age of metrics and numbers, academic copyright on scientific texts undergoes a distortion that is altering its nature and scope, which is indeed one of the consequences of the worrying process of research commodification.