Why do so many European countries grant scientific authors who receive public funding a right of republication (or secondary publication) that allows them to make their work freely available to the public even if they have assigned their copyright to a commercial publisher? If scholars really want to make a public use of reason in the Kantian sense, why is publication not enough? The root of such a predicament is not copyright, which can be circumvented to foster a growing public domain instead of commercial monopolies, as the GNU-GPL and Creative Commons licenses show. It is an evaluation of research that has been separated from the discussion among researchers who can understand and critique the "content" of the papers, to be placed in the hands of bureaucrats, or scholars working as bureaucrats, who use bibliometrics to make calculations about "containers" or publication venues. As a result, the owners of the containers, which have become indispensable for evaluating research and deciding on researchers' careers, have been able to impose restrictive copyright terms on authors and their institutions and to extract ever higher prices from a kind of publishing that no longer has anything to do with "making public". In countries like Italy, whose legislation does not even recognize the right of republication, their oligopolistic position is even stronger because bibliometric evaluation is not only centralized, but also mandated by a government-appointed agency, ANVUR. Therefore, a right of secondary publication could certainly help - and in Italy more than elsewhere - , but just as a palliative to a crisis of publication that could only be overcome by burning its root, which is a journal-based evaluation of research.