Evidence of meeting #110 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was publishers.
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Can you give me a sense of which publishers? Are they a certain group of publishers or is it just broadly how many publishers...?
Chief Information Officer and Chief Librarian, Chief Librarian's Office, University of Guelph
We participate in licensing at the national level through the CRKN, which you heard from in Ottawa. Those would be the five major publishing entities. Those licences get paid on an annual basis, so they represent a significant portion of this.
Chief Information Officer and Chief Librarian, Chief Librarian's Office, University of Guelph
I can only hazard a guess at this point. It's probably 50%—at least.
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Fifty per cent of the $8 million is going to five publishers.
Chief Information Officer and Chief Librarian, Chief Librarian's Office, University of Guelph
That's correct.
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Okay. Can you submit to the clerk those publishers that you're investing nearly 50% of that $8 million in?
Thank you.
Chief Information Officer and Chief Librarian, Chief Librarian's Office, University of Guelph
In terms of the names?
Chief Information Officer and Chief Librarian, Chief Librarian's Office, University of Guelph
They are Springer, Wiley, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis.... I'll have to figure out what the fifth one is.
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Okay. No problem.
Can you give me some ideas around what the other $4 million is being spent on? Fifty per cent is going to the publishers. The other 50%...?
Chief Information Officer and Chief Librarian, Chief Librarian's Office, University of Guelph
Yes. It goes to resources like JSTOR, online scientific resources that are more index in nature and provide access to resources, as well as to print materials: books, a very limited number of print journals anymore, and electronic books, which we typically purchase packages for.
Liberal
Chief Information Officer and Chief Librarian, Chief Librarian's Office, University of Guelph
Sure.
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
We're hearing 92% digital over and over again. One of the things that we're trying to do is to get an understanding of the investment, where it's going, and how much of it is actually going back into the Canadian content creators, because we also hear from Canadian content creators that their revenue is going down. I see university expenditures going up, with most of it, over 50% of it, going to the publishers, and to certain groups of publishers, yet the revenue of the content creators is going down. We are trying to deal with that dilemma.
Chief Information Officer and Chief Librarian, Chief Librarian's Office, University of Guelph
I think this has been mentioned in a couple of the other presentations that have taken place, but I certainly would pose the question. As we see a drop in the number of students pursuing arts and humanities degrees, certainly at our institution, we will be purchasing less content that flows out of the Canadian creative literary market.
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
That's a very interesting comment, because we also heard that the expenditure on arts and literature is going down, whereas the investment by universities in scientific research and science-based content material is going up. Do you see the same trend?
Chief Information Officer and Chief Librarian, Chief Librarian's Office, University of Guelph
That trend was in place long before the fair-dealing changes. That's our market reality: scientific publishing in particular has increased annually, well beyond the CPI. If you look at the revenue reports from the publishers I mentioned, you'll recognize where a lot of that money has gone.
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Okay. So if we look at the revenue of the publishers....
Mr. Chair, how much time do I have?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy
Thanks. I will take your 30 seconds and put them in my pocket.
Mr. Jeneroux, you have seven minutes.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
Thank you, everyone, for being here today.
We've heard the opening comments by Mr. Harnum, who stated that there was an agreement in place initially, as well as the comments that were made previously in committee with regard to fair dealing and what that meant. Then we heard Ms. Graham's comments about how they opted out of the Access Copyright agreement.
I'm trying to figure this out. From where the legislation came into place in 2012 to where we are now, Ms. Graham, what precipitated your decision to move out of the agreement?
Chief Information Officer and Chief Librarian, Chief Librarian's Office, University of Guelph
I'm going to ask my colleague Heather Martin to speak to that, because I wasn't at the university when that decision was made.
Heather Martin Copyright Officer and Manager, E-Learning and Reserve Services, University of Guelph
I would say that a number of factors caused us to decide to opt out. It really was precipitated by the Access Copyright agreement that we had, which was coming to an end, and Access Copyright's decision to file a tariff with the Copyright Board, which was a change in structure around how it was going to be handled.
Before that happened, we were already seeing, as Rebecca has mentioned, a shift to digital, which meant that we were purchasing our content through digital platforms that were giving us the right to do the same things with that content that we were paying for through the Access Copyright licence. That was what precipitated us to change.
In the print world, it made sense to have a copyright licence with Access Copyright, because we were making photocopies to hand out in class and to share with students, but once we accessed that content through digital platforms, where we're paying up front for the right to make multiple copies to hand out in class or for students to access through the learning management system, we would effectively have been paying twice.