Thank you for the opportunity to join you today. On behalf of the members of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, I want to thank each of you for your work on this important statutory review. My name is Carol Shepstone, and I am past vice-chair of the board of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network or CRKN.
CRKN is a partnership of Canadian university libraries from across 10 provinces and encompassing two official languages. The 75 institutions that currently participate in CRKN include all research universities as well as the vast majority of teaching universities. We collectively serve over one million students and 42,000 faculty. Twenty-nine of CRKN's members are also members of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, and all our members are also member institutions of Universities Canada.
Through the coordinated leadership of librarians, researchers, administrators, and other stakeholders in the research community, CRKN undertakes large-scale content acquisition and licensing initiatives in order to build knowledge and infrastructure as well as research and teaching capacity in Canada's universities. As such, CRKN provides an important voice in understanding the evolving scholarly creation and communication landscape within higher education in Canada.
The members of CRKN support a balanced copyright law that recognizes both the rights of copyright owners and the fair-dealing rights of our users. We are pleased to add our voice to other higher education sector stakeholders, including Universities Canada and CARL, in supporting the preservation of fair dealing, particularly as it pertains to educational uses.
Leveraging the purchasing power of all universities in Canada, CRKN negotiates and manages licences for digital scholarly content on behalf of its member libraries at an annual value of $125 million. The vast majority of this scholarly journal content is authored by faculty as part of their academic research expectations. In the current scholarly publishing model, faculty as creators typically provide these research outputs to journals for no financial compensation, and then journal publishers sell this research output back to universities through library subscriptions such as those licensed through CRKN.
CRKN negotiates licences that ensure access and terms of use that are valuable to students and faculty, including the ability for universities to use this material in course packs and e-reserve systems, as well as permitted uses that fall within the Canadian Copyright Act.
As the national licensing consortium in Canada, CRKN facilitates investment in key Canadian scholarly publications across a variety of disciplines. Through subscriptions to journals and purchases of e-books, CRKN members provide faculty and students with valuable Canadian content. An annual investment of $1.3 million includes a subscription to Canadian Science Publishing journals and access to the e-books of the Association of Canadian University Presses. In addition, CRKN members have made one-time investments of more than $11 million to secure perpetual access to the Canadian Electronic Library e-book collection, and $1.5 million for access to digital, historical Globe and Mail content.
CRKN also partners with Canadian publishers to advance new models of open access scholarly publishing. Through our long-term relationship with the Érudit Consortium, which began in 2008, students and faculty have access to Canadian French scholarly content. This has evolved into a collaborative partnership including both Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project, and in 2018 the Coalition Publi.ca initiative was launched as a model of sustainable Canadian scholarly production. CRKN members have committed more than $6.7 million to support this initiative over the next five years.
Through our support of and now merger with Canadiana.org, CRKN members have also facilitated the digitization, access, and preservation of Canadian heritage materials. Members currently invest nearly $1.3 million annually, and have made one-time investments totalling $1.8 million to support this unique historic content.
Overall, CRKN university members are annually committing $2.9 million to Canadian content licences, and over CRKN's 19-year history have made $15 million worth of one-time investment in purchasing Canadian content.
These investments demonstrate a commitment to Canadian scholarly publishing and to a robust and healthy research infrastructure in Canada. CRKN members support scholars as creators and authors, respect the rights of copyright owners, and at the same time ensure that students and researchers, as users, have access to essential international scholarly content.
Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.