Evidence of meeting #114 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 works.
University Librarian, University of British Columbia
It's similar for us too. We don't really have direct dealings with the Copyright Board that I am aware of, but I would echo what was just said down at the end of the table.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
I have about 30 seconds.
Ms. Parker, I'm sorry to be picking on you so much with my questions today. You made one comment in your opening statement about extending the life plus 50 years. What would that cover? Right now we see life plus 70 years only with sound recordings. What would be the scope of the life plus 70 in your field?
University Librarian, University of British Columbia
I'm sorry. I'm not following. What is the question?
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
What would the scope of life plus 70 cover in yours? We only see life plus 70 right now in the music industry with sound recordings.
University Librarian, University of British Columbia
My understanding is that's the length of the copyright, life plus 50.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
Yes, but you said in your opening comments that you'd like to extend that.
University Librarian, University of British Columbia
No, it's the opposite. I would not.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
Okay. I misunderstood you. Where would you like it to go, then?
University Librarian, University of British Columbia
It's fine as it is. I wouldn't extend it. I don't have a recommendation for reducing it. I think it is what it is.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
It's interesting that you put it in your opening comments then.
University Librarian, University of British Columbia
Well, what I'm saying in my opening comments is that I do not wish for it to extend to 70 years.
Conservative
Liberal
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to go across the panel. I'd like to get your feedback on what we've heard from content creators. What they have consistently told us is that their revenue keeps going down year after year, despite the fact that they continue to create the content. Without the content, we wouldn't be in the position we are. Also, some of the smaller publishers are saying that their revenue is going down.
Yet we see that the universities are spending a large amount of money. In your case about $5 million over, I think, 15 years, and that has increased. We also heard from some of them that the reason is that large international distributors are charging a significant amount of money.
Can you give me your thoughts on how we can find that balance? Everyone is also saying that without creators of the content, we wouldn't be here. We want to protect them, and yet we want to make sure there is access to good-quality information, because we want to foster growth and innovation. Yet we hear from the authors on the open mike, and what they say is heart-wrenching.
Give me your thoughts. How would you approach it if you were in our shoes?
University Librarian, University of British Columbia
Because I deal in an academic institution and most of the content that we're talking about is academic in nature that's requested and required by our faculty and researchers—that's also what they feed into—there's a great bit of dynamism right now among academics who publish to try to remake their own system of scholarly communication to basically create in an open access fashion ways that they can disseminate their research that don't require a paywall. It's challenging because I don't care who you are, if you're publishing a journal in whatever format, there's a cost to it.
These discussions are not by any means complete, but there are a lot of different efforts that are afloat, and I think that's the most important thing, to keep trying different things, for scholars and other creators to try different things, but for authors of literary works, how many can we purchase? I think that's a really interesting question for us. We have to balance a budget where we try to prioritize, in our case, purchasing British Columbia authors, purchasing indigenous authors, helping them find a platform for their works. When we catalogue something that we've purchased, everyone around the world knows that it exists. I think that those kinds of megaphones that libraries provide are helpful.
I think there's a lot that creators have to do in order to figure out the best mechanism of distributing things.
University Librarian, University of British Columbia
I think that creators have some power. I know that's true in the academy.
Co-Chair, Copyright Committee, Canadian Association of Law Libraries
I think it's fair for me to say that across sectors among law libraries budgets are decreasing and there's less funding available to purchase in particular packaged resources or digital resources or licences or continuing resources, which are very common in law, so books that are supplemented. We pay annually for additional supplements to the same book.
What I can say is that there is also, in my personal experience, definitely an increase in monograph purchases. One outcome at the University of Victoria of our exit from Access Copyright is that we tend to proceed when we reproduce materials by either fair dealing or permissions—the permission may be associated with a fee or it may not be—or the library often orders extra copies, purchases extra copies of the books. Law books are very expensive and that is one reason that we tend not to require students to purchase them. However, just this past term, for the first time ever, I required all my students to purchase a book on legal writing because it's an excellent book and I knew that I would want to assign more readings than fair dealing would allow for that book. Again, I worked out a really good arrangement with the publisher for a reasonable cost for the students.
Generally speaking, I'm not sure if it's the case for other academic institutions, but our monograph budget is not going down, and we're trying to get it to go up. The problem is the pressures from the larger academic packages that bring our commitments to those to a greater ratio or greater percentage of our acquisitions budget. A similar situation exists in law society libraries and legal firm libraries where many of the large subscription products are simply not purchased in print anymore because they're too expensive.
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Mr. Lorimer, I'm really interested to hear your perspective [Inaudible—Editor] publication from an open access, one in print and—
Treasurer, Canadian Association of Learned Journals
—the rest of them. Yes, for sure.
The Canadian Association of Learned Journals has been working for over 10 years to try to get the libraries to understand that Canadian publishing—journal publishing and monograph publishing—is fundamentally different from international publishing in science, technology, medicine, and engineering. We are primarily devoted to dissemination of material, communication of knowledge amongst academics, and so on.
There are a number of proposals by international committees of libraries saying, “Why don't you work with us? We are responsible citizens, etc.” At many of the meetings I go to since all this has happened, we get into this complaint about how the libraries are victims because they're so much smaller than these international organizations. It's true. But we are sitting there and we have the same relationship to libraries that they have to international publishers. Who gets killed in a situation where copyright doesn't work and if open access goes too far? It's Canadian publishers reporting on Canadian research and publishing Canadian authors.
Last year on July 17, we put forward a proposal called the journal impact and innovation fund. We took it to the libraries and said, “We would like to work with you and effectively we'd like to get double the amount of subsidies and purchases that we get and we will help you solve the problem of paying vast bills for retrieving Canadian research from international publishers.”
We didn't get anywhere.
President, British Columbia Library Association
In our original remarks, we identified recent information from Statistics Canada about how Canadian publishers had reported a profit margin of 10.2% in 2016. I would also just like to point out that within the Lower Mainland in the libraries I am familiar with, there have been recent programs to encourage self-published local authors who often are really completely unfamiliar with how to even really sell their works. We've developed programs and are actually working with authors and some vendors and some publishers to help them get their works to market and into our libraries, public libraries. We are acting on the ground in some of these areas in a way to really help authors.
Don, do you have...?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy
On that note, I want to thank our panel for coming in today. There's been a lot of great information. You've seen me leaning over to these guys and asking them whether this is good stuff, and they're saying, “Yes, it's great stuff.”
I want to thank everybody for coming today. We're going to suspend until four o'clock, when we will resume with our second panel.
Thank you very much for coming and participating.