Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this afternoon.
As you've just heard, my name is Rebecca Graham and I'm the university librarian at the University of Guelph. I'm joined here today by Heather Martin, our copyright officer and manager of e-learning and reserve services.
Today I would like to share with you the history of fair dealing practices at the University of Guelph. For almost 35 years we have practised effective management of copyright. In doing so, we facilitate and advocate for responsible and informed uses of copyrighted materials through compliance with the act and compliance with the many licences and contracts we negotiate with digital content publishers and providers, and engagement with Guelph faculty, students, and staff. We provide expertise and guidance on copyright and authors rights issues, as well as fair-dealing practices, so that they understand both their rights and their obligations as creators and consumers of content. We also have a commitment of staff and other resources to support copyright education and compliance.
In 1984, the University of Guelph was among the earliest Canadian institutions to implement an institutional copyright policy, one that included specific guidelines on fair dealing. Guidelines adopted at that time did not differ substantially from the fair-dealing policy in use at universities today. They specified copying from books “may not exceed ten percent of the monograph”, and for periodicals, “one article in five from any one issue”, no more than 10% of the whole issue.
There were dramatic shifts in our collection development strategy from the mid-1990s to 2010 as we moved away from the acquisition of individual books and journals in print to the increasingly larger-scale acquisition of digital content to the benefit of our patrons, made possible through technological advances.
During the period, the university paid for a collective licence with Access Copyright to authorize photocopying of print materials, paid transactional licences to Access Copyright for copying that exceeded what could be copied under the terms of the blanket licence, paid publishers and creators directly for the right to digitize and post course materials online, and continued to use fair dealing to authorize copying works that were excluded from Access Copyright's repertoire.
By 2010, the majority of journal and book content utilized for courses was from our subscriptions to digital publications. Given this rise in an increasingly networked world, which in turn enabled both digital publishing and new learning environments, the collective licence for reproducing print materials no longer had value.
In January 2011, the University of Guelph was one of a number of Canadian universities choosing to opt out of the Access Copyright model and choosing to manage our own copyright practices. Subsequent developments between 2012 and 2017 supported this decision, most notably the Supreme Court decision in Alberta (Education) v. Access Copyright, which affirmed that fair dealing for purposes such as private study and research extended to teachers making copies for their students.
The addition of education as a fair dealing purpose in the 2012 Copyright Modernization Act provided further clarity on the scope of fair dealing in an educational context. In 2012, the university adopted the fair dealing policy for universities developed by Universities Canada based on the Supreme Court decision.
In 2017 through 2018, the recently completed fiscal year, our acquisition budget was $8 million, with which we purchased or subscribed to international scholarly output, including substantial portions of Canadian University Press output, as well as literary works by Canadian authors. We subscribe to e-books from the Association of Canadian University Presses. We provide a digital publishing platform for a number of scholarly journals and we contribute to the national journal publishing efforts, including Érudit.
In that period, we also spent $100,000 on transactional licences to accompany educational materials that fall outside the limits of fair dealing. Currently, 92% of the materials we acquire are digital and the rights we negotiate provide for greater legal opportunities for the use of those materials.
Students at the university access course readings in a variety of ways. They purchase textbooks from the university bookstore. They also access materials placed on reserve in the learning management system including 54% through direct links from licensed materials, 24% open and free Internet content, 6% via transactional licences, with the remaining 16% under fair dealing.
I would like to conclude by stating that we support the retention of fair dealing, as it currently exists in the legislation. I would like to thank you again for this opportunity to speak with you today.