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CAUT Intellectual Property Conference Report

Ottawa, October 27-29, 2006
by Dominique Scheffel-Dunand, French Studies, Faculty of Arts, York University

7 Mar 07 - How to mobilize knowledge on copyright law on our university campuses?From Friday October 27 to Sunday October 29 2006, academics, policy makers and members of the general public gathered in Ottawa to discuss the place of intellectual property in the academic realm and to debate the role faculty and librarians can play in mobilizing knowledge on copyright law on their campuses.

Sharon Wang posted an extensive review of the various presentations at the conference, Ruthanna Dyer reported accurately on the workshop discussions, and Jay Rahn provided a detailed list of actions YUFA, academics and librarians should take on campus to disseminate information on intellectual property.  To mobilize the York community as well as its shareholders and stakeholders to take action, this report is drafted in order to share some insights on concepts such as “Open access scholarly periodicals” and “Creative commons licenses”.  But to understand these concepts, some information on the latest reform on copyright law in Canada -- Bill C-60 -- needs to be introduced first.

1. Canadian government proposal for Copyright Reform
Since the late 18th century, disputes around copyright law are the norm.  Bill C-60, officially unveiled in June 2005, is the latest round of Canadian reform on copyright law.  The Internet, new technologies and new media have drastically altered the composition of copyright stakeholders and shareholders and Bill C-60 is a bill that purports to prepare Canada for the implementation of the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet treaties.  It addresses various digital copyright issues including the creation of a new “making available” right as well as new legal protections for digital locks, known as digital protection measures (TPMs) and Digital Rights Management (DRM) (see John Blazina’s detailed report on this topic as he is pointing out clearly the impact of the Canadian reform on copyright law in academia).  As academics, librarians or students can expect, on the horizon lie fierce debates over the appropriate role of copyright in education, the competitive consequences of Bill C-60 ‘s anti-circumvention provisions as well as the new legal protections for databases and academic knowledge. 

Therefore, as Jay Rahn, advocates in his report “on matters of intellectual property, the appropriate voice of Canadian professors and librarians consists of Canada’s professors and librarians themselves.”  With Bill C-60, Canadians do face critical copyright policy issues that will impact the future of Canadian education, research, innovation and culture.  The WIPO Internet treaties have had a transformation impact on the scope of copyright law.  The treaties feature a broad range of provisions targeting copyright issues with the most controversial provisions: i.e. the anti-circumvention provisions that provide adequate legal protection and effective legal measures against the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs).  To disseminate some information on the Canadian proposal for copyright reform, and the various provisions added, here is a list of websites to consult:

2. Open access: Reshaping rules of research
CAUT, YUFA, the York community as well as other associations of faculty should also develop an understanding of new instruments to disseminate their scholarly work and conduct some investigations on “Open access scholarly periodicals” and “Open archive repositories”.

In January 2007, five leading European research institutions launched a petition that called on the European Commission to establish a new policy to require that all government-funded research be made available to the public shortly after publication. According to Michael Geist “That requirement – called an open access principle – would leverage widespread Internet connectivity with low-cost electronic publication to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe.” (M. Geist, Toronto Star, February 26, 2007).

In Canada, federal funding agencies in the sciences, social sciences and health sciences give out hundreds of millions of dollars each year to support research at Canadian universities. University researchers typically published their findings in peer-reviewed publications, which are purchased by those same publicly funded universities. Athabasca University and UQÀM are at the moment the sole Canadian universities to establish both a repository and a policy requesting that faculty submit electronic copies of all publications.

The Directory of Open Access Journals, a Swedish project that links to open access journals in all disciplines, currently lists more than 2,500 open access journals worldwide featuring over 127,000 articles. Moreover, the cost of establishing an open access journal has dropped significantly. Thanks to the Open Journal System, a Canadian open source software project based at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, more than 800 journals currently use the freely available OJS to bring their publications to the Internet. Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research.

According to Peter Suber, an American scientist and former professor of law and philosophy, Open Access is free on-line information. He furthermore states, “Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open Source, on the other hand, has to do with access to software (on-line), yet also created for the good of the community, making software accessible. For a more in-depth explanation, see: http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

Suber has highlighted three vicious circles or stalemates that affect progress toward the OA commons in research literature. They are as follows:

  • If all or most journals were OA, then universities would save money. They would only have to pay for outgoing articles by their own faculty, not for incoming articles by faculty elsewhere. But paying for outgoing articles is a new expense. Overall, the OA system may cost less than the present subscription-based system, but universities may not have the money for the new system until the old system has withered away. In short, universities can’t afford OA for their outgoing articles until they have cancelled enough conventional journals; but they can’t cancel enough conventional journals until OA spreads. During an indefinite transition period, universities or other research sponsors will have to pay for both kinds of journal. This transition cost might deter or at least delay the emergence of a publishing model that is not only superior for all the purposes of scholarship, but also less expensive. Here the stalemate is not universities waiting for one another, but universities waiting for OA to arrive so that they can afford to bring it about.

  • If some universities invest in the superior alternative and pay for outgoing articles, other universities can enjoy OA to those articles without reciprocating. Late adopters of OA can freeload on early adopters. Some universities might think: “We won’t make this investment, benefiting others until enough others make it, benefiting us.” Universities thinking this way end up waiting for one another, paralyzing them all.

  • Journals compete for excellent articles, and journal prestige is one of the major incentives attracting author submissions. But OA journals are generally new. Even if excellent from birth, they have not had time to acquire the prestige or impact factors of older journals, even inferior older journals. In short, new journals need prestige in order to attract excellent submissions, and need excellent submissions in order to generate prestige.

These obstacles seem to coincide with what Stevan Harnad (2003), a cognitive scientist and Canadian Research Chair at the University of Québec at Montréal (UQAM), has encountered as well. Harnad cites the confusion or lack of knowledge academics have about OA and comments on their conceptions (or misconceptions) of it. He states “some people also think OA is only or mainly to solve the libraries' serials crisis (the journal pricing/affordability problem), whereas the real problem OA is intended to solve is the researchers' access/impact problem. (See: http://www.citebase.org/isi_study as well as
cern et libre acces). There is a need for scholars to appreciate that OA has the potential to make their work more visible than any kind of priced publication (in print or on-line), and will make it also easier for readers to find, apply, build upon and cite.

The failure to lead on this issue could have long-term negative consequences for Canadian research.
Clearly, for this not to happen is largely dependent on the ‘friendliness’ of the institution to promote OA and to facilitate the development of such systems. While Harvard, Cornell, Duke and the University of California are outstanding academic institutions and deserve praise for their ‘openness’ to OA, some would still say that these are not representative of all universities, particularly as two are categorized as ‘Ivy League” schools. However, at the same time, their names carry weight in society as many people look to these institutions for answers as well as the setting of standards. People could begin to question, “well, if the ‘Ivy League schools’ are doing it, why aren’t we?”

Open Access is making progress on every continent, but it is moving faster in Europe. Switzerland remains ahead, however, and stands out for already creating OA domains in Health/Medicine, Retail/Hospitality, Environment and Nature, and Finance (banking). Europe leads in the soundness and coherence of OA policies and in the speed of adoption (see Berlin3 policy as an example as well as several major research institutions in France (INRA, CNRS-Centre national de la recherche scientifique, INRIA, and INSERM) officially declaring to encourage OA. However, it is important to note that most of this discourse on OA deals with science and medicine, and not so much on arts and humanities (please see the following table).

*Directory of Open Access Journals In English only
(Data compiled in April 2006)

Area

Number of Sites
MEDICINE

289
EDUCATION 167
TECHNOLOGY 131
BIOLOGY 97
MATHEMATICS 96
HISTORY 92
LANGUAGES & LITERATURE 87
LIBRARY SCIENCE 68
LINGUISTICS 58
SOCIOLOGY 57
PSYCHOLOGY 55
ENGINEERING 51
ANTHROPOLOGY 37
MEDIA & COMMUNICATIONS 28
MUSIC 24
GENDER STUDIES 21
VISUAL ARTS 20
PERFORMING ARTS 9
ARCHITECTURE 5
ENVIRONMENTAL 2

* It is important to note that there is not an equivalent of this directory of Open Access journals in French cited on the Google web search engine, dated October 2, 2006.

In Canada, one can observe a steady increase to both OA journal listings (see the Directory of Open Access Journals and increased support of OA at the institutional and national levels (see the following:
Le mouvement de Libre Accès à la Recherche and
ABRC Libre accès).

In Toronto, the Knowledge, Media, and Design Institute (KMDI) at the University of Toronto has been active in getting both faculty members and graduate students involved in and made aware of OA through various forms of communications and collaborative projects. KMDI is responsible for the dissemination of knowledge on OA (see Project Open Source I Open Access: http://open.utoronto.ca/).

Where do we go from here? We need to know if what is happening at the institutional level reflects what is happening on the ground, so to speak, at a micro, everyday interactional level. We need to know how individuals manage, negotiate, and challenge these dominant institutional discourses on OA and more specifically at York. YUFA could, at this level, play an active and interactive role in engaging the York community in discussions on Open Access Journals and Open archives repositories.

To get acquainted with the Open source and Open access movement, here are a few sites to consult:

3. Freedom to authorize instead of freedom to forbid. The Creative Commons Project -- Intellectual Property Conservancy

The licensing under creative commons was extensively discussed at the CAUT conference. The primary goal of the creative commons members is to build a community around the development of tools facilitating creative commons licenses and standards. The actual licensing options Creative commons has made available are designed mostly for cybercitizens, scholars and artists looking for some protections when they wish to move their publications or wares into the public domain. Those protections may include requirements that the work not be altered, employed for commercial purposes or used without proper attribution or citation. For more information on protections with creative commons licenses, see reference to the creative commons website below.

What is Creative commons then? Creative Commons is an intellectual property conservancy founded to enrich and cultivate the public domain and to facilitate sharing of artistic, literary, scientific, and other intellectual works with the public on generous terms. Creative Commons is a non-profit corporation led by Directors Hal Abelson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), James Boyle (Duke Law School), Michael Carroll (Villanova Law School), Eric Eldred (Eldritch Press), Lawrence Lessig (Stanford Law School), and Eric Saltzman (Harvard Law School). The creative commons conservancy service will provide access to more reliable, legal protections that will make participation in open source projects more likely. For more information on the Creative commons project and scholars, students and artists who are using it, see following references:

Other Reports from this Conference:
 John Blazina's Report
Ruthann Dyer's Report
Jay Rahn's Report
Sharon Wang's Report