Industry Committee on May 7th, 2018

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

A member of your association would publish in a journal. Let's say a student, or maybe somebody's who's very interested in their work across the country, emails that member of the faculty, a professor, and says, I love your position on these things. I don't subscribe to this particular publication. Would you email that to me for me to review? Is that happening? Are people saying, no, you have to go through the proper channels of subscribing to the publication. If you're at work, you submit to the publication and pay for the publication. I'm trying to get a sense of how that world operates.

[David Westwood]

You used the example of a student approaching us, a student at an institution, looking to move from, say, a bachelor's to a graduate-level program, and if they're a student at a university, presumably through their own institution they would have access. Personally, my bias has always been to provide the citation and say, look up some of my work. You can find it through your library most likely. Exchanging PDFs, for example, I'm sure people do it. I don't think it's good practice. I don't think it comes up, because, as I say, most people who approach us are already students somewhere.

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

So there hasn't been a complaint from your association saying, too many people are emailing us to get this for free when they should be paying for it?

[David Westwood]

No. As I mentioned, the big concern we've heard is students sharing lecture notes and things online. That's become the one thing that's come to our attention over the past couple of months.

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

Okay.

Mr. Lorimer, could you chat a little bit about the TPMs and digital locks, and your opinion on that? Mr. Westwood shared some of his opinions. If you did, I apologize, I didn't catch it. Where do we sit with regard to the WIPO agreement and the Berne convention? How would you reconcile some of that with your association?

[James Lorimer]

All of the publishers involved in this project are members of the various regional and national publishing associations. The project that we're working on is like its own specific project. We're not, let's say, a policy.... Not all of us agree, by the way, with all the positions the publishing associations take. I think there is much greater diversity of opinion than you might have been exposed to amongst publishers about the issues around copyright, and Access Copyright and so on.

As far as digital locks are concerned, we've run into the issue that was mentioned earlier today about disabled students needing to get access to files and needing to do things with files in order to make them available. Really, our fundamental objective is to get people to use and read our material. We're not like the multinationals, whose job it is to extract as many millions of dollars from every national territory they can. We're publishers like real publishers used to be, which is we want people to read our material, not to turn this into an MBA, a way of getting as much money out of every market that you can possibly get.

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Mr. Jowhari, you have five minutes.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Mr. Westwood, I have two questions. First, a quick one, I want to get your opinion of the middle-ground concept that was suggested by Mr. Lorimer, and then I want to talk about the crown copyright that you started talking about.

Can you give me your response and your thoughts on the middle-ground concept that was tabled today?

[David Westwood]

I thought it was very interesting. I think innovation is key in moving forward, and in all areas of academia. When you described it, it struck me as odd that this was new. I assumed there were already options like that available, so that was good to hear. It does seem like something—

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

It's fair for Mr. Lorimer to drop by and have a chat with you later on, correct?

[David Westwood]

Well, I was wondering if you were going to ask me—

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

I just want to make sure. As a committee we're trying to help. I just wanted to open that door.

Mr. Lorimer, now you have an open invitation.

[David Westwood]

I should have clarified that as a faculty association, you wouldn't have approached us to talk about something like that. As academics, what we want to do is ensure that students are exposed to materials that will help them learn. In the notion of fair dealing, as we said, the key there was to strike a balance so that education can continue and the people who produce content are compensated, in a balanced manner. This idea of custom course packs, I think, is an interesting concept.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Let's go to crown copyright. You touched on that. As the crown, there is a lot of research being done, especially with the $4-billion investment that we made in the 2018 budget for doing research and building infrastructure. What are your thoughts? How can we benefit from those? How does copyright fit into all of the research and publications being generated?

[David Westwood]

It's an interesting question. As I said, many of my speaking notes on that point come to me from CAUT, national level. Their framing of the issue is that works that have already been funded through public dollars ought to be made available to the public that paid for them.

It goes hand in hand, in a way, with muzzling of federal scientists. The idea of open government, open access, open data, I think, is the inspiration for that idea. The public should have access to the works that they helped fund.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

You're saying if it's anything that's generated by the crown, it should be open to the public.

[David Westwood]

Yes, that would be the idea.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Canada also makes investments in universities by enabling the professors and the research councils, etc., to create different publications, yet for those we go through the publishing houses. Help me understand the difference between the two.

[David Westwood]

I'd like to know the difference as well, because that issue often comes up. Many of the federal funding agencies now insist on open access publishing as a contingency of funding. I am being funded by NSERC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, with the stipulation that I use funds from the grant to help defray the cost of publishing and make it openly accessible for that very reason. This is an issue that will have to be considered.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Do you have a final thought on open access?

[David Westwood]

In principle, I'm very much in favour, and I think most academics would be. Most of us are not interested in hiding and profiting from our work. As you say, we're already paid a good salary. We want to get our work out in the hands of people who can use it. I think that's really the motivation, that cost doesn't become a barrier, from an equity standpoint, to people getting access to the research they need to improve their lives.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

For the last round of questions, Mr. Masse.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I was just doing a little work here regarding YouTube and whether other countries seem to be going on with artistic communities as well. Mr. Long, just in reading some articles from the U.K., Australia, and a couple of other spots, there seem to be love–hate relationships going on with it.

Even if Canada comes up with something, do we need an international agreement on this?