Thank you very much.
As the chair noted, I am Rowland Lorimer. I'm the founding director of the professional master of publishing program at Simon Fraser University and Treasurer of the Canadian Association of Learned Journals. I appear on behalf of the Canadian Association of Learned Journals, and I thank you very much for this opportunity.
Before I start, I'll add that I'm also the publisher of eight different journals, seven of which are online, open access journals. One has a print component and is open access to the level that is required by the tri-council agencies.
Canada has over 630 scholarly journals with budgets of over $50,000 per title. This amounts to about $30 million of economic activity. About 10% of funding comes from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The rest comes from professional and institutional support and market earnings in and outside Canada.
The notion of user rights and the inclusion of education as fair dealing are founded on the social behaviour of single readers. They wisely affirm exchange amongst readers, and facilitate the use of modern copying technology to allow close study. The central problem for Canadian journal publishers and most Canadian publishers is that on the legal foothold of an education user right, educational administrators have seized the right to deliver all kinds of mostly unlicensed content, including core learning materials, to students without recompense to authors and publishers. Further, many educational institutions require their instructors to compile content that pointedly avoids triggering the education community's self-defined rules for compensating authors and publishers.
These rules were tested in Federal Court in a suit by Access Copyright of York University, and they were found wanting. The court found that the vast majority of copied content was unlicensed. It mainly came from books, but it also included unlicensed Canadian journal content. In a way, then, the talk of millions spent on licences is mostly irrelevant to the Canadian content found in print course packs and uploaded to learning management systems without compensation. Our suggestion is that the education user right be treated as a self-initiated right of biological persons and as not extendable to institutions or other persons downloading and distributing on their behalf, nor as a means of delivering course content.
In scholarly journal publishing, recompense to authors is not an issue. Authors receive a basket of benefits for publishing their research. For scholarly journals, the issue is that educational administrators are undercutting the resources Canadian journals need to maintain efficient and effective not-for-profit publishing and distribution of Canadian research.
In Canada, journal costs are very affordable, largely because Canadian journal publishing is dominated by not-for-profit organizations. One fairly typical example of a subscription-based journal has 55 Canadian institutional subscribers who pay the journal just $7,000 in direct subscriptions. The journal attracts roughly 200,000 article views per subscription. The cost to Canadian institutions is 3.6ยข per article view, yet the education administrators want more and are taking more without recompense. Rather than supporting the development of Canadian journal publishers for their primary focus on knowledge dissemination, educational institutions are crippling the very sector that is best able to make knowledge available in an affordable fashion.
In short, the seizure of user rights by educational institutions to deliver course content without compensating creators and publishers weakens the generation and communication of ideas. For journal and other publishers, it forecloses on opportunities to build intellectual property-founded businesses, a growth sector in developed economies. More generally, it deprives Canada and Canadians of jobs and opportunities in copyright-based economic activity.
For individual students, it is already erecting unfair barriers to the generation and communication of Canadian knowledge for about the cost of a case of beer per student.
Thank you.