Update December 10: the original was over the 2,000 word count. Following is the final version under 2,000 words, followed by the original in case anyone is interested in what was cut.
House of Commons
Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology
Individual Submission to: Statutory Review of
the Copyright Act
December 10, 2018
Dr. Heather Morrison
Associate Professor
School of Information Studies, University of
Ottawa
This is an individual submission drawing on my
background as Principal Investigator of Sustaining
the Knowledge Commons (SKC), a research program funded through a SSHRC
Insight Grant. The goal of SKC is to develop evidence to support the economic
transition of scholarly publishing from demand to supply side to support the
potential unprecedented public good of a global knowledge commons, a collective sharing of the knowledge of
humankind, free for anyone to access and free for all who are qualified to
contribute to. I also draw from my broader interest in and value of the arts
and culture, and my expertise in the area of development of information policy
to support such values. This submission strongly supports the expansion of fair
dealing exceptions to copyright that were introduced in the 2012 Copyright
Modernization Act. I present evidence to support the retention of sections 29,
29.1, and 29.2 in their present form. In brief, broad fair dealing exceptions for education (section 29) are inherently generally fair because the
majority of works consumed are produced and/or supported by people in the educational
sector who do the work for the public good rather than private gain. In the
university context, academic researchers and students create the vast majority
of works consumed and, with some exceptions, do not expect or receive economic
benefit from their copyrightable works. There is a strong and growing trend for
academic researchers to make work freely available to everyone as a public
good. Provincial education systems develop curriculum, approve and sometimes
commission textbooks. Schools and school boards pay for textbooks and the
majority of other resources used by students. I acknowledge that there are
creators whose work is important to Canada (local authors, artists, musicians
and publishers) who do not benefit from K-12 or post-secondary budgets. For
this sector, I recommend development of
a plan to provide direct support for Canadian creators working outside of
the formal educational systems (K-12, universities) to replace the current
copyright collectives and to develop new models of creative collaboration to take advantage of recent technological
developments to develop new, more effective approaches to support for
creativity in Canada. I make this recommendation on the grounds that direct
subsidies to creators would be more cost-effective than the current system that
is in effect an indirect subsidy. Currently, we very limited support to creators
in an indirect and non-transparent way as follows: federal transfers to
provinces for education; provincial transfers to universities, colleges, and
school boards (supplemented by student tuition in the post-secondary sector);
purchase of resources and payment of additional fees or licenses for additional
copying to copyright collectives; disbursement of $ from copyright collectives (subtracting
administrative costs) to a variety of types of copyright owners, ranging from
global for-profit corporations to individual creators. I argue that we should
investigate whether it would be less costly and more effective for Canada’s
creative community to simply give $ directly to creators through generous
subsidies. For clickable links see https://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2018/12/canadas-statutory-review-of-copyright.html.
The
creative contributions of Canada’s educational sector
(Why
broad fair dealing exceptions for education (section 29) are inherently
generally fair)
This section will focus on universities, my
area of expertise. As noted in the Universities Canada (2018) submission to the
Copyright Act Review, there are more than 75,000 faculty members and university
teachers in Canada’s university system, making this the largest group of
Canadian authors. This data understates the creative contributions of
universities as it does not take into account the work of students. Most
graduate students and other early career researchers are required to publish
and many are prolific researchers and authors. For example, graduate students
today are typically required to publish their theses (monograph-length works)
online through their institutional repository as open access, that is, free to
read. For example, from 2010 – 2018, University of Ottawa students posted more
than 10,000 theses in the University of Ottawa’s institutional repository: https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/242
Students as well as faculty publish articles
in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and scholarly monographs. Students
are taking advantage of the ease of publishing on the internet to develop their
own open access peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Two examples: Stream: Inspiring Critical Thought,
currently in its tenth year of production: http://journals.sfu.ca/stream/index.php/stream.
And the University of Ottawa Journal of
Medicine | Journal Médicale de l’Université d’Ottawa http://www.uojm.ca/
In the classroom, many professors like myself
are taking advantage of current technologies to develop pedagogical approaches
based on active rather than passive learning. In a passive approach, students
absorb information provided in textbooks and lectures. In active learning,
students are doing hands-on work including conducting and publishing research. Examples
from my classes: students create an open access journal in which they
peer-review and publish their term papers and create and publish professional
open access blog posts.
As a faculty member and author, my experience
is fairly typical. The cost of doing my research is paid for by my salary as a
university professor and my research grant funds. Both are heavily subsidized
by the Canadian taxpayer, and student tuition fees today accounts for about
half of university budgets. As an author, I receive and expect no remuneration
when I publish peer-reviewed journal articles or book chapters. As a peer reviewer,
I receive and expect no remuneration. I did receive modest royalties from sales
of a scholarly monograph, however from a financial point of view I (and many
other authors of scholarly monographs), I would be much farther ahead had I
devoted the time required to write the book to a minimum wage job. In
retrospect, I wish that I had published this material as an open access book or
wiki as the publisher is no longer actively marketing the book. By transferring
copyright to the publisher, I made my work less accessible and far more
difficult to update.
I seek to make all of my academic writing open
access (free to read for everyone), a steadily growing trend in academia
globally. As of December 2018, there are over 12,000 fully open access,
peer-reviewed scholarly journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals
https://doaj.org/
According to industry research (Ware and Mabe, 2015) there are about 34,550
peer-reviewed journals published worldwide; the percentage of these that are fully
open access is about a third. Many more journals provide free access to back
issues after an embargo period.
The Directory of Open Access Repositories, OpenDOAR, lists over 3,800 repositories
worldwide http://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/view/repository_by_country/countries=5Fby=5Fregion.html
The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine https://www.base-search.net/about/en/
provides a cross-search service of repositories and journals and lists over 120
million documents from over 6,000 sources, of which about 60% are open access,
about 72 million documents. This free access to academic works, supported by
academic authors, universities, and research funders is a reflection of the
fact that academic research is not inspired by, and does not require, the economic benefits of copyright. The moral rights of copyright (attribution
and integrity of the work) are important to academic authors.
The traditional scholarly publishing industry
is in the process of transitioning from demand side economics (purchase of
books and journal subscriptions) to production-based funding. Today, the
largest open access journal publishers by number of fully open access journals
are all traditional commercial scholarly publishers (Morrison, 2018). As of the
end of November 2018, Elsevier has 347 fully open access journals and offers an
open access publishing choice for 2,040 other titles, almost all of their
journals (Elsevier, 2018). As of December 7, 2018, the Directory of Open Access
Books https://www.doabooks.org/ lists
285 publishers; 3 of the 4 publisher sponsors listed on their website are
traditional commercial scholarly publishers (Brill, Springer Nature, and DeGruyter).
There is a related growing trend towards open
access to educational materials, in order to lower costs for post-secondary
students and school boards and permit for updating and local modification of
materials. Some resources for further information:
· e-campus
Ontario https://www.ecampusontario.ca/
· BCcampus
https://bccampus.ca/
· Open
School BC https://www.openschool.bc.ca/k12/
In addition to transitioning traditional
formats developed before the internet (e.g. journals and books), faculty and
students are beginning to explore the potential of the digital medium and the
internet. My most important publications today are published primarily in
non-traditional formats. Since 2004, I have maintained a scholarly blog called The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/where I post, for example, contributions
like this to government consultations. In 2014, I developed a research blog for
the Sustaining the Knowledge Commons https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
(SKC) project. The SKC blog provides a venue for myself and my student research
assistants to publish early findings. This is excellent training for students
as it gives them a means and incentive to develop and publish small
sub-research projects. Data gathered through the SKC project is published as
open data in the OA APC dataverse: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/open-access-article-processing-charges-apcs/
These new formats require access to technology and hosting services, but there
is no longer any need for a publishing intermediary as was the case when
academic work relied on the print medium and postal system.
Transition
support for creation
As a prolific academic author, I never have
been and never will be represented by Access Copyright. The work of Access
Copyright is antithetical to the purposes of my work (to serve the public good).
I recommend the abolition of Access Copyright and redirection of funding by
universities and school boards to directly support open access in academia and
the K-12 sector (e.g. funding for open access monographs, journals, and
textbooks).
This will not meet all of the needs of
Canada’s creative communities. In my opinion, Canada’s artistic creators
(authors, artists, musicians, independent publishers and intermediaries who
work closely with and for the artistic community) deserve our respect and
support, and are not well served by our outmoded approach to copyright
collectives. I argue the continuing existence of these collectives is
counter-productive as it entrenches outmoded approaches and business models
when creators would be better served by developing new types of collectives to
take advantage of new technologies to create new relationships with society and
consumers.
For example, imagine a collective of Canadian
musicians working together to develop packages of music for use in places like
coffeeshops and restaurants (perhaps based on genre) that is integrated with
the business’ wifi so that customers can:
· instantly
purchase and download a piece of music they enjoy
o
connect with the website of the
musician(s)
o
find out about upcoming live gigs
o
purchase merchandise
· suggest
musicians / music to include
I argue that this approach would be far more
effective in creating a healthy and productive relationship between our artists
and society than the current impersonal, non-transparent approach involving
requiring payment of tariffs that positions copyright collectives as
impersonal, non-transparent enforcers of rights.
To accomplish this vision, I recommend
financial support for artists in the transition phase as well as targeted
funding to develop mechanisms for transition such as research and education on
the use of new technologies to support more productive artist / society
relationships. As I explain in the introduction to this submission, direct
support would likely be more cost-effective than the current system of indirect,
non-transparent subsidies.
References
Elsevier (2018). Pricing. Retrieved November 27, 2018 from https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/pricing
Morrison, H. (2018). Global OA APCs 2010 –
2017: major trends. Connecting the knowledge commons: from projects to
sustainable infrastructure. Elpub 2018: the 22nd international
conference on electronic publishing. Toronto June 22 – 24, 2018. Retrieved
December 7, 2018 from https://elpub.episciences.org/4604
Universities
Canada (2018). The changing landscape of
Canadian copyright and universities: Universities Canada’s submission to the
Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology’s statutory review of
Canada’s Copyright Act / June
2018 Ware, M. & Mabe, M. (2015). The STM report: an overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing. The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers. Retrieved Dec. 4, 2018 from https://www.stm-assoc.org/2015_02_20_STM_Report_2015.pdf
Following is the original version that I was not able to submit as it was over the 2,000 word count.
House of Commons
Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology
Individual Submission to: Statutory Review ofthe Copyright Act
December 10, 2018
Dr. Heather Morrison
Associate Professor
School of Information Studies, University of
Ottawa
This is an individual submission drawing on my
background as Principal Investigator of Sustainingthe Knowledge Commons (SKC), a research program funded through a SSHRC
Insight Grant. The goal of SKC is to develop evidence to support the economic
transition of scholarly publishing from demand to supply side to support the
potential unprecedented public good of a global knowledge commons, a collective sharing of the knowledge of
humankind, free for anyone to access and free for all who are qualified to
contribute to. I also draw from my broader interest in and value of the arts
and culture, and my expertise in the area of development of information policy
to support such values. This submission strongly supports the expansion of fair
dealing exceptions to copyright that were introduced in the 2012 Copyright
Modernization Act. I present evidence to support the retention of sections 29,
29.1, and 29.2 in their present form. In brief, broad fair dealing exceptions for education (section 29) are inherently generally fair because the
majority of works consumed are produced and/or supported by people in the educational
sector who do the work for the public good rather than private gain. In the
university context, academic researchers and students create the vast majority
of works consumed and, with some exceptions, do not expect or receive economic
benefit from their copyrightable works. There is a strong and growing trend for
academic researchers to make work freely available to everyone as a public
good. Provincial education systems develop curriculum, approve and sometimes
commission textbooks. Schools and school boards pay for textbooks and the
majority of other resources used by students. I acknowledge that there are
creators whose work is important to Canada (local authors, artists, musicians
and publishers) who do not benefit from K-12 or post-secondary budgets. For
this sector, I recommend development of
a plan to provide direct support for Canadian creators working outside of
the formal educational systems (K-12, universities) to replace the current
copyright collectives and to develop new models of creative collaboration to take advantage of recent technological
developments to develop new, more effective approaches to support for
creativity in Canada. I make this recommendation on the grounds that direct
subsidies to creators would be more cost-effective than the current system that
is in effect an indirect subsidy. Currently, we very limited support to creators
in an indirect and non-transparent way as follows: federal transfers to
provinces for education; provincial transfers to universities, colleges, and
school boards (supplemented by student tuition in the post-secondary sector);
purchase of resources and payment of additional fees or licenses for additional
copying to copyright collectives; disbursement of $ from copyright collectives (subtracting
administrative costs) to a variety of types of copyright owners, ranging from
global for-profit corporations to individual creators. I argue that we should
investigate whether it would be less costly and more effective for Canada’s
creative community to simply give $ directly to creators through generous
subsidies. For clickable links see https://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2018/12/canadas-statutory-review-of-copyright.html.
The
creative contributions of Canada’s educational sector
(Why
broad fair dealing exceptions for education (section 29) are inherently
generally fair)
This section will focus on universities, my
area of expertise. As noted in the Universities Canada (2018) submission to the
Copyright Act Review, there are more than 75,000 faculty members and university
teachers in Canada’s university system, making this the largest group of
Canadian authors. This data understates the creative contributions of
universities as it does not take into account the work of students. Most
graduate students and other early career researchers are required to publish
and many are prolific researchers and authors. For example, graduate students
today are typically required to publish their theses (monograph-length works)
online through their institutional repository as open access, that is, free to
read. For example, from 2010 – 2018, University of Ottawa students posted more
than 10,000 theses in the University of Ottawa’s institutional repository: https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/242
Students as well as faculty publish articles
in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and scholarly monographs. Students
are taking advantage of the ease of publishing on the internet to develop their
own open access peer-reviewed scholarly journals. A few years ago while
pursuing my doctoral studies I had the pleasure of participating as an editor,
reviewer, and journal manager of the student created and led peer-reviewed open
access journal Stream: Inspiring Critical
Thought, currently in its tenth year of production: http://journals.sfu.ca/stream/index.php/stream. Similarly, medical students at the University
of Ottawa have created and run a student-led open access journal, the University of Ottawa Journal of Medicine |
Journal Médicale de l’Université d’Ottawa http://www.uojm.ca/
In the classroom, many professors like myself
are taking advantage of current technologies to develop pedagogical approaches
based on active rather than passive learning. In a passive approach, students
absorb information provided in textbooks and lectures. In active learning,
students are doing hands-on work including conducting and publishing research. Following
are just a few examples from my classes (master’s level, information studies): a
publishing class created an open access journal in which they peer-reviewed and
published their term papers; students in an introductory class create and
publish their own professional blog and posts, in which they publish
independent research; and this fall students collaboratively conducted and
wrote a literature review and analysis of current issues on a particular topic
in the field.
As a faculty member and author, my experience
is fairly typical. The cost of doing my research is paid for by my salary as a
university professor and my research grant funds. Both are heavily subsidized
by the Canadian taxpayer, and student tuition fees today accounts for about
half of university budgets. As an author, I receive and expect no remuneration
when I publish peer-reviewed journal articles or book chapters. As a peer reviewer,
I receive and expect no remuneration. I did receive modest royalties from sales
of a scholarly monograph, however from a financial point of view I (and many
other authors of scholarly monographs), I would be much farther ahead had I
devoted the time required to write the book to a minimum wage job. In
retrospect, I wish that I had published this material as an open access book or
wiki as the publisher is no longer actively marketing the book. By transferring
copyright to the publisher, I made my work less accessible and far more
difficult to update.
I seek to make all of my academic writing open
access (free to read for everyone), a steadily growing trend in academia
globally. As of December 2018, there are over 12,000 fully open access,
peer-reviewed scholarly journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals
https://doaj.org/
According to industry research (Ware and Mabe, 2015) there are about 34,550
peer-reviewed journals published worldwide; the percentage of these that are fully
open access is about a third. Many more journals provide free access to back
issues after an embargo period.
The Directory of Open Access Repositories, OpenDOAR, lists over 3,800 repositories
worldwide http://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/view/repository_by_country/countries=5Fby=5Fregion.html
The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine https://www.base-search.net/about/en/
provides a cross-search service of repositories and journals and lists over 120
million documents from over 6,000 sources, of which about 60% are open access,
about 72 million documents. This free access to academic works, supported by
academic authors, universities, and research funders is a reflection of the
fact that academic research is not inspired by, and does not require, the economic benefits of copyright. The moral rights of copyright (attribution
and integrity of the work) are important to academic authors.
The traditional scholarly publishing industry
is in the process of transitioning from demand side economics (purchase of
books and journal subscriptions) to production-based funding. As recently as
2014, very few of the large traditional commercial scholarly publishers were
reflected in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The largest,
Elsevier, had 8 titles listed in DOAJ. Today, the largest open access journal publishers
by number of fully open access journals are all traditional commercial
scholarly publishers. The largest is Springer Nature (including subsidiary
BioMedCentral), and second largest is Elsevier (Morrison, 2018). As of the end
of November 2018, Elsevier has 347 fully open access journals and offers an
open access publishing choice for 2,040 other titles, almost all of their
journals (Elsevier, 2018). As of December 7, 2018, the Directory of Open Access
Books https://www.doabooks.org/ lists
285 publishers; 3 of the 4 publisher sponsors listed on their website are
traditional commercial scholarly publishers (Brill, Springer Nature, and DeGruyter).
There is a related growing trend towards open
access to educational materials. For example, provincial K-12 and
post-secondary education is in a process of transitioning from support for
textbooks through curriculum development, assessment, and purchase, to funding
production for textbooks so that they can be open access, reducing the costs of
education for post-secondary students and school boards in K-12. In addition to
lowering costs, open access educational resources are typically open for
transformation. This makes it possible for educators to update sources such as
textbooks, link to additional resources, or customize to meet local needs. For
example, a good basic textbook developed in the U.S. could be modified to
reflect the Canadian context and include local examples, or the reverse for a
textbook developed in Canada. Some resources for further information:
· e-campus
Ontario https://www.ecampusontario.ca/
· BCcampus
https://bccampus.ca/
· Open
School BC https://www.openschool.bc.ca/k12/
In addition to transitioning traditional
formats developed before the internet (e.g. journals and books), faculty and
students are beginning to explore the potential of the digital medium and the
internet. My most important publications today are published primarily in
non-traditional formats. Since 2004, I have maintained a scholarly blog called The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/where I post, for example, contributions
like this to government consultations. In 2014, I developed a research blog for
the Sustaining the Knowledge Commons https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
(SKC) project. The SKC blog provides a venue for myself and my student research
assistants to publish early findings. This is excellent training for students
as it gives them a means and incentive to develop and publish small
sub-research projects. Data gathered through the SKC project is published as
open data in the OA APC dataverse: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/open-access-article-processing-charges-apcs/
These new formats require access to technology and hosting services, but there
is no longer any need for a publishing intermediary as was the case when
academic work relied on the print medium and postal system.
To summarize this section: the fair dealing
exception for education (29) is inherent generally fair because the educational
sector is a net creator. Academic faculty are the largest single group of
creators of copyrightable works. The creation of copyrightable works by
post-secondary students is substantial if not fully known, and the trend is
towards more creation of copyrightable works by students. The post-secondary
and K-12 sectors are moving towards production-based support of educational
resources such as textbooks to provide for free access to enhance the affordability
of the educational system. Creation in the educational sector is done primarily
for the public good, and the economic benefits of copyright are generally unnecessary,
as illustrated by the growing trend towards open access, that is, access to
anyone that is free of charge, and the constrictions on readership associated
with copyright protection for economic reasons is counter-productive to the
creation and sharing of knowledge.
Fair
dealing exceptions for research by academics (29.1) and news reporters (29.2)
are necessary so that individuals
and organizations cannot use copyright in a way other than originally intended,
e.g. to suppress criticism or to deny what they have said in the past. For
example, my research involves studying the pricing and business models of
scholarly publishers based largely on information posted on their websites. This
material constitutes the evidence on which my research is based, and I need to
be able to publish excerpts of this material to substantiate my claims. Publishers
do not always appreciate this research, for example when I document price
increases far beyond inflation. Overly strong copyright without this balance
would make it possible for publishers to weaken criticism by suppressing
evidence.
Transition
support for creation
As a prolific academic author, I never have
been and never will be represented by Access Copyright. The work of Access
Copyright is antithetical to the purposes of my work (to serve the public good).
I recommend the abolition of Access Copyright and redirection of funding by
universities and school boards to directly support open access in academia and
the K-12 sector (e.g. funding for open access monographs, journals, and
textbooks).
This will not meet all of the needs of
Canada’s creative communities. In my opinion, Canada’s artistic creators
(authors, artists, musicians, independent publishers and intermediaries who
work closely with and for the artistic community) deserve our respect and
support, and are not well served by our outmoded approach to copyright
collectives. I argue the continuing existence of these collectives is
counter-productive as it entrenches outmoded approaches and business models
when creators would be better served by developing new types of collectives to
take advantage of new technologies to create new relationships with society and
consumers.
For example, imagine a collective of Canadian
musicians working together to develop packages of music for use in places like
coffeeshops and restaurants (perhaps based on genre) that is integrated with
the business’ wifi so that customers can:
· instantly
purchase and download a piece of music they enjoy
o
connect with the website of the
musician(s)
o
find out about upcoming live gigs
o
purchase merchandise
· suggest
musicians / music to include
I argue that this approach would be far more
effective in creating a healthy and productive relationship between our artists
and society than the current impersonal, non-transparent approach involving
requiring payment of tariffs that positions copyright collectives as
impersonal, non-transparent enforcers of rights.
To accomplish this vision, I recommend
financial support for artists in the transition phase as well as targeted
funding to develop mechanisms for transition such as research and education on
the use of new technologies to support more productive artist / society
relationships. As I explain in the introduction to this submission, direct
support would likely be more cost-effective than the current system of indirect,
non-transparent subsidies.
References
Elsevier (2018). Pricing. Retrieved November 27, 2018 from https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/pricing
Morrison, H. (2018). Global OA APCs 2010 –
2017: major trends. Connecting the knowledge commons: from projects to
sustainable infrastructure. Elpub 2018: the 22nd international
conference on electronic publishing. Toronto June 22 – 24, 2018. Retrieved
December 7, 2018 from https://elpub.episciences.org/4604
Ware, M. & Mabe, M. (2015). The STM report: an overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing. The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers. Retrieved Dec. 4, 2018 from https://www.stm-assoc.org/2015_02_20_STM_Report_2015.pdf
