Speed and ease are the two things that matter when accessing information in the current research environment. This is especially the case for researchers in Canadian universities who are competing with other researchers around the world. The up-front costs to access information in journals is a burden on the budgets of university libraries and research budgets and is reducing the pace of research and the exchange of new and exciting discoveries.
In the public education system, the funds used to create original works come from the tax-paying public. The creators of works of art or research at publicly funded institutions receive their pay through government grants. Professors, assisted by graduate students, get grants through publicly funded agency (e.g. NSERC, SSHRC, CIHR) in the form of grants and scholarships. In this scenario, the taxpayer has already paid the creator for the work they produce. We argue that, because of this, there is no reason for the public or, indeed, other public researchers to pay restrictive user fees to access the results of academic research.
The distribution of content should be carried out in such a way to maximize access and minimize the cost for the public. The Internet provides a great opportunity to do both. For academic writing, the most efficient way to distribute information is through Open Access Journals and Open Access distributors and publishers on the Internet. Open Access refers to the publishing model where up-front costs are eliminated for published research articles and the user is free to copy and distribute the research articles they have downloaded to their peers and the public at large.
This approach does not mean that students or professors would be giving away their rights to the work, as is common practice in the private, monopoly publishing industry. The less restrictive copyrights used in Open Access publishing allow the creator to maintain rights over any commercial production of their work such as a printed book or reproduction meant for sale. If that were the case, only the creators would be able to make money from their work. However, for those interested in reading the works for interest would not be bound by any restrictions on copying and distribution.
Copyright and the publicly funded education system
Currently, the academic community pays large sums of money through their publicly funded university libraries in order to access its own works. With subscription fees to academic journals increasing every year, the cost to the public is excessively high, but the distribution of information to students and researchers is slow, which in turn, slows the rate of innovation.
In addition, the public itself is completely left out of this equation and does not have access to the information produced by the research it funds. This is because academic libraries, needing to balance tight budgets, continue to sign agreements with the publishers where they agree to limit access to their materials to the academic community. In the end, limiting access to information that he public has paid for only decreases the rate at which good ideas can reach others and thus slows the rate at which innovations can be used.
Increased user costs are also limiting access to research results in the rest of the world. Restricting access to wealthy countries and universities hinders innovation and reduces the size of the research community. Indeed, restricting access only limits the ability for Canadian researchers to coordinate research internationally. At the very least, it puts researchers that are in poorer universities (even in the “developed world”) at a disadvantage by hampering their access to new information while cutting off potentially important research collaborations.
In order to ensure adequate sharing and circulation of information, it is crucial that publicly funded research results be made available through an Open Access model. Additionally, increased access for the public and fair remuneration for the creator must be the sole incentive for changes in the copyright law.
]]>Corporate-backed ignorance peddlers have come north to Canada to assault both the intelligence and ears of the Canadian news-watching public. As insulting as the arrogant grin on an oil executive's face saying sorry about the massive oil spill that put your livelihood out of business and as slick as your father's suit you wore to the high-school formal that is two sizes too small, these professional liars, cheats, and immoral peddlers of fairy-tales have invaded our country.
These ignorance enablers are focused on undermining thoughtful dialogue, interrupting informed analysis, and repeating contradiction-fueled and seizure-inducing corporate double speak in three-second message boxes.
We have all heard it on the US cable "news" shows from our neighbour to the south and we have all shaken our heads while reaching for the remote, wondering how the Americans had allowed the level of debate to fall so far. Around the world, people have wondered if it was the US education system, the short attention span of the MTV generation, that gives support to the proud to be an ignoramus culture that oozes from their cynical populist politics. In Canada, we had hoped it was a uniquely American fault and that our borders, even though open to all forms of content, would somehow keep it out. Well, it has turned out to be wishful thinking. The menace of the mega-corporation funded ignorance-producing industry has setup a base in Canada, and it has seemingly setup inside the Conservative Party's office of public relations.
Now, it is no secret, even to the world, that the vast majority of Canadians enjoy or even crave informed debate. We, in Canada, like watching people who know more than us tell us how it is, challenging us to think more critically. We do not take ourselves so seriously that we devolve into feces throwing exercises at the drop of a point that we disagree with. This is not just a Canadian trait, but I think it is generally recognized that Canadians have an abundance of this tolerant-to-alternative-views trait. It is because, if we cannot be as big and powerful as our neighbours to the south, we are at least going to be taken seriously by the rest of the world. We understand, like that old saying that starts "do onto others", that to get respect and to be taken seriously, one must dish-out the same to others.
Unfortunately, this is exactly the attitude that allows the cry-baby ignorance peddlers to operate so effectively in Canada. They have mastered the dubious art of rehearsed lines that make you feel bad for them because they do not get it or, in some cases question their sanity, and in the moment that you have paused to say "there, there, we can think through the problem" they, the Ignorance Peddlers, have turned on you like a rabid zombie, bit you on the leg and spewed another pre-packaged, freeze-dried line that at once attacks your man/woman-hood, calls you a traitor, and makes that tiny percent of ignoramuses accidentally watching the show feel good about themselves.
It is hard to know how to deal with these kind of people who are increasingly appearing on-air and in our papers, but the thinking people of Canada better figure it out soon. While it is not hard to spot these menaces as they are usually speaking on behalf of some mind-bendingly contradictory position (oil being ethical, good for nature mining, public services you pay for out-of-pocket being cheaper than those that are free), it is hard to limit their impact.
Of course, this is not a new problem. This new version of the charlatans, coming from the line of (ethical) snake-oil and Ponzi Scheme salespeople, however, are more dangerous. They now come with professional trickster certificates from university and one heck of a lot of money. The only way to deal with them is the same as before.
First, it is best just to identify and avoid, but when that fails, and you end up face-to-face with one on TV or radio, do all us thinking people a favour: call them out, tell them that they are hurting debate in the country, that the majority of people do not appreciate being dragged into the mud. Then immediately go back to the rational, informed comment you were so rudely interrupted from making. In short, follow the Internet comment-thread wisdom and don't feed the trolls.
]]>There are differences between creator rights and owner/distributors' rights. The creator of a work has the original ownership of the copyright for that work. However, under the current copyright system, if a creator wants to make money from their work then they generally have to give up or sell their ownership rights to a distributor. Thus, the "owner" and the "creator" may not be the same individual. In fact, owners tend to be large corporate publishing houses whereas creators are individual artists. This relationship is not a co-operative relationship since each is trying to maximise their profit from the work and the power relation between the creator and the owner is not equal either. While it is true that the creator of the copyrighted work needs the distributor to get money, the distributor usually holds the copyrights of many works from different creators, and, as such, there is greater ability on the side of the distributor to forgo the ownership of one copyright if they are not happy with the price.
The reason for distribution also differs between the creator and distributor. The creator usually wants their work to reach the widest possible audience in order to get recognition for creating the original work. However, a private, for-profit, distributor may want to limit access to drive up price and maximise profits.
This balance is supposed to be regulated by copyright legislation which helps bind the relationship between the creator and owner enough that the creator does get paid for the work they produce.
There is a more complex relationship between the creator, the public (users), and the distributor of works when in the public education system.
In a public education system, the money to create original works comes from taxes, through the government, to the creator of works of art or research in the form of salary or grant. In addition, there may be many more people involved in a particular project than in the private setting. A professor may take on graduate students, who are also public employees, and there may be technicians that are paid to do work through research grant money. Their pay comes from the government through grants or scholarship which is from a publicly funded agency (e.g. NSERC, SSHRC, CIHR). As such, the creator has already been paid by the public for the work that they produce. Under this scenario there is little reason for the public to then have to pay restrictive user fees to get access to the works. The distribution of the content should, therefore, be done in a way to maximise access and minimise cost. With the invention of the Internet and with most documents produced by academics now being in digital form, there is little cost associated with having the information that academics produce available to everyone. In fact, even if there is a cost to this, it is marginal compared with the cost of producing the material in the first place.
For academic writing, the most efficient way to distribute the information is through Open Access Journals and Open Access distributors and publishers on the Internet. For art that is not digital, the works can be released under a less restrictive copyright to allow the works to be freely used (with attribution) by the public who paid for the work and by other students who are learning and producing new work. However, this does not mean that the student or professor would be giving the works away for others to make money from. The less restrictive copyrights can allow for the creator to maintain rights over any commercial production of their work such as printed book or reproduction meant for sale.
The history of copyright is not that long. Copyright first appeared in 1662 as a way to protect the creators of work and writings from being exploited by the monopoly of the print houses. At the time, printing presses were a brand new invention and were so expensive to own and run that only a few large monopolies had them. The new printing presses gave the printing companies the ability to print large numbers of books for a relatively small cost per book. The creators complained that these monopolies were making money off the results of others' labour by mass producing books but not paying the writers their fair share of the profits. The printers also had many old books to print so there was little incentive to pay a writer very much to write a new book for distribution.
The governments at the time had to come up with a way for the users (the public) to be able to get new works and for the creators to be paid for the creation of their new work. Copyright acts were the result of this balance-seeking exercise and stopped the over-exploitation of the creator by the private printer/distributors. Money for creators and ownership rights for printers to make profit so that they would keep printing books.
To this end, Copyright was created with the intention of being limited in time, so as to protect the users' rights (the public) to have access to works produced. It was understood at the time that if copyrights were infinite, that would hurt the people the works were intended to reach by limiting access and would reduce the incentive for the creators to create new works. It was also created with the intention of providing an equitable renumeration for the creators by providing a short period of time that writers could benefit from the selling of their works.
The intent was to have enough renumeration for the creators so that they may continue to create original works for the public. This is done through limiting the right of the public to copy these creations without paying the creator. However, the private printers (the large distributors and publishing monopoly capitalists) have constantly fought for increased control and more limitation on access to increase their profits and thus undermining the original intent of copyright.
Examples of abuses of this can be found in the way that the MPAA and other distributor coalitions work to restrict all access to materials and to lobby the government to allow them to control every level of the distribution process. This control is both to the detriment of the end users (the public) and the independent producer of works of art and research.
If we are to keep with the original intent of Copyright legislation, then the distributor's rights should be limited to simply allowing for the efficient distribution of art and information. Increased access for the public and fair renumeration for the creator should be the only incentive for changes in the copyright law.
Intellectual Property is a term that tries to lump copyright, trademarks, and patents into a single group. However, these were intended to have different impacts on society and should not be lumped together if one wants to have an intelligent conversation about copyright and the outcome of intellectual and artistic labour.
It is also a term that tries to apply the word "property" to ideas. This should be critically evaluated since all ideas are not, in and of themselves, unique like that of other types of property. In fact, I would argue that copyrighted works were not considered "property" until the establishment of the World Intellectual Property Organisation in 1970. Until this time copyright at an international level was co-ordinated by its own agreements that maintained the original intent of copyright -- to both increase public access and protect the fair renumeration for creators of copyrighted material.
Currently, publicly funded university libraries have to pay out large sums of money so that the academic community can have access to its own works. This comes at a huge cost to the public and slows down distribution of information to those that do research which, in turn, slows the rate of innovation.
The public itself is all but completely left out of this equation and do not have access to the information produced by the research that they have funded. This is because academic libraries, needing to balance tight budgets, continue to sign agreements with the publishers where they agree to limit access to their materials to the academic community.
The for-profit distributors and publishers also limit access to this material to the developing world through charging these user fees. Limiting access only to the rich countries and universities restrains innovation and reduces the size of the effective research community. At the very least, it puts researchers that are in poorer universities (even in the first world) at a disadvantage by increasing the time that they have to wait to get access to "new" information. With the increase in the speed of research any amount of time that poorer researchers have to wait limits their ability to fully contribute.
The push for increased access to works can be found in the formalised Open Access and limited copyrights movements. These movements seek to increase access to original works through recommending that individual creators attached less restrictive copyrights to their own works. Less restrictive copyrights like that of GNU Licences and the Creative Commons models of limited legal copyright allow more flexibility in allowing users the ability to access, copy, and redistribute original works.
These licences are used by those who want their works distributed to the widest audience. For this, the creator gives up some of their right to stop people from copying the work for certain uses such as non-commercial distribution.
Public funding for the creation of works of art and research in the academic sector is done through research grants and salaries for professors and researchers. Since the public has already paid for the labour needed to create works in this sector, it would make sense for the public to also have access to these works.
The licenses such as Creative Commons and other copyleft licences and Open Access repositories and distributors are a particularly useful method for achieving distribution efficiently and free to the user. Distributors that fall under the category of Open Access have to provide the information they distribute freely, right from the time they get the information to distribute, to the end-user. This is usually done through a website where articles or other works are stored in a searchable database and where users can download the article or work from the site.
The money needed to run the service is charged to those that create the work or through grant money. Usually, those who create the work use part of their research grants (public money) to pay for the service that Open Access distributors and publishers provide. Many funding organisations that provide research grants are starting to provide specific funding for the publishing of articles in these Online Open Access repositories. Examples include the Welcome Trust (UK), the National Institute of Health (US), and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (Canada).
There are over 100 000 peer-reviewed Open Access journals available online that can be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org) which include high-impact journals like those of the Public Library of Science (http://www.plos.org).
Recently, some creators have expressed frustration at the limited nature of current copyright law and have looked for alternatives to restricting copying and distribution of their works. Alternatives that have been brought forward that seek to broaden instead of limit the right to copy and distribute original works fall collectively under the heading of Copyleft.
Copyleft licences are attached to works that the creator wants to release some or all of their rights over their work. Copyleft uses current copyright law because it gives the creator the right to waive all or parts of the rights over their own work. Copyleft licences are simply the exercising of this right on a large scale.
The first major example of these kinds of licences was the GNU General Public Licence created to licence free and open source software. The licence applies to software code (which is covered under copyright law) that the creator wants to release into the public domain. The software code under GNU-GPL licence can be copied, altered, and redistributed freely so long as the user redistributes that new or altered code under the same licence. This allows computer programs under this licence to be manipulated and made better by users and then redistributed into the public domain for others to use and alter. An example of this is the distribution of the GNU/Linux operating systems.
Another Copyleft licence called Creative Commons Licences has been developed that is more flexible that is now commonly used for works of writing and art.
Creative Commons licences is a legalese backed licence one can attach to their works if they do not want to "reserve" all rights allowed to them by copyright law. Currently, copyright law allows for very limited use of an original work by users without expressed permission granted by the author of that work. Creative Commons licences allow for the author to grant the user greater right to copy, distribute, or alter without the user having to contact the author. This is done through one of these less restrictive copyrights being attached to the work. If the work is being distributed digitally then simply a link to the Online version of the licence is all that is needed. When, as a user, you come across the Creative Commons (CC) mark then you can follow the link to the licence and see what rights the author has granted you beyond the restrictive copyrights under law.
There are many combinations of rights that the creator can grant users of his/her work. The additional rights have to do with the ability to:
For academic purposes there is interest in limiting the users rights to remove the original attribution of the work or alter the original work. However, there is interest in increasing the user's ability to copy, redistribute, and perhaps use the work for commercial purposes.
This would be called an attribution-no derivatives Creative Commons Licence.
Pre-Print archives and repositories are another method of allowing other researchers and the public free access to the information contained in copyrighted articles. Pre-print archives hold in their repositories editions of article that were produced before the creator sold or transfered the copyright of the article over to the print publisher. This means that when the creator (the original owner of the copyright) was writing the article they had the right to distribute that work to where ever they wanted, including onto a website that allows people to download and copy the work. So long as the edition that is sent to the publisher/printer is different in some small way (layout, subtle changes in text, etc.) the "pre-print" that was put up on the website does not need to be taken down when the final edition is sent to the printers.
Such Pre-print Archives and repositories are available at some universities using DSpace and similar databases. One very popular Online repository is called ArXiv.org which is hosted at Cornell University. This repository is used mainly by math, chemistry, physics, statistics, and computational biology researchers and Pre-prints of papers that have been published in high profile pay-per-view journals such as Science and Nature can be found on arXiv.org.
]]>The government, with the passing of the 2011 budget implementation act, has changed the rules governing how much in government-subsidized student loans can be lent out. The limit before this change was $15 billion which, by government numbers, was to be breached in January, 2013. The change that has been brought means this limit has been eliminated and the regulation of student debt has been devolved down to the ministerial level, out of sight of the public and parliament.
With the new rules, nothing public will happen when the government reaches, probably arbitrary, ceilings set by the ministry for human resources and development which oversees the Canada Student Loans Program. The government bureaucracy can now just increase the limit again without consulting the public and without looking at the effects of student debt on graduates and the economy. It is a move that essentially takes the regulation of student debt (and therefore funding for post-secondary education) out of public view and discussion will be initiated through this legislation about whether or not this level of student debt is sustainable or if other options should be sought.
For some background on why this is very troubling, the debt that is accumulated as student loans is basically public debt that the government has hidden by putting it onto the backs of students. The increased debt burden will be on top of taxes that these students will pay the federal government, meaning that they will be less likely to respond positively to increased taxes for social services. It means that even more people will be opposed to publicly funded social programs because they will be paying for their own education still as well as the next generation’s. This is a shift from a few decades ago where the previous generation pays for the next generation’s education. This is basically how all our social programs are funded — the working generation’s pay taxes and fund the system that supports the younger generation while providing a welfare insurance system for themselves.
We are hiding the costs (and the debt incurred) of social programs like education through the delaying payment for them for a generation. We are making the current young generation pay for artificially high standard of living of the middle-income group in Canada enjoys. It is bad management of the economy and is not sustainable. In fact, it is worse than this because the people that actually end up getting jobs will also be paying the subsidies to those that did not get good jobs and the increased debt burden from the incoming generation of students (increased tuition fees).
The only move from here is either privatization of the entire system to balance the weight of the social programs or the complete socialization of the program and the elimination of student debt that is outstanding. Which do you think we will get without massive public protest? The NDP do not even have a program to re-invest that kind of money into the system (of course?), but we need to start talking about the actual cost of making education a right in this country.
It is $15 billion in deferred spending by the federal government (currently held as student loans) plus $5 billion in deferred maintenance (currently held as crumbling university infrastructure) plus $600 or so million to deal with the increased enrollment (since the 1990s) plus $1.3 billion or so a year for reducing tuition fees to make the federal grants system actually work plus $2.5 billion to the grants system to eliminate the growth in student debt.
All that money will just bring us to 1990 levels. If we want to actually make PSE accessible to all who qualify and want to go then we must talk about another way we can invest and manage the system with the provinces.
It sounds like a lot of money (because it is), but it is not out of reach for Canada. It would also have a profoundly positive effect on our economy and could be paid for easily even under the current capitalist system. However, that is hardly the point, is it? The likelihood of this full program being implemented is probably the same as a full socialization of the university system in Canada and putting it all under the control of students and faculty and workers. It is almost Utopian, but this is what we need to demand if the current generation of youth is to be given a chance at a good life.
]]>A quick comment on Andrew Jackson's post on Behind the Numbers (one of CCPA's blogs).
The Canadian Federation of Students have similar numbers to Jackson in their student unemployment fact sheet (PDF).
Most economists I talk to are generally at a loss over how the government thinks it can increase student and youth employment without direct state intervention in the economy through wage subsidies and/or direct student employment programs.
Even according to the OECD, if youth employment is just left to the market, any increases in the minimum wage results in an increase in unemployment of youth and students. They suggest that without government support for youth/student/apprenticeship programs, youth unemployment will continue to be high and lead to a large range of long-term social ills. Hardly a socialist position, but it does indicate that under the current economic system state intervention is necessary to ensure students and youth are not just pushed out of the labour market. However, this is just shifting employment around since students end up taking the low paid jobs instead of someone else. Really, the only way to bring this kind of unemployment down is to provide wage subsidies or direct student-focused public job creation.
The Canadian Federation of Students has long supported the Federal Student Work Experience Program and similar programs that subsidize wages for students who work in the summer. The problem is that this program has not seen the increases necessary to keep up with enrolment, never mind the increase in need by students and demand by small businesses and non-profits. The Federation has indicated this numerous times even when the government reversed a decision to make cuts to the programs.
That being said, students say that the way to address high youth and student unemployment is to address the main average level of unemployment. The traditional student and youth job markets (i.e., entry-level positions and temporary employment) are eaten up by the reserve army of the skilled out-of-work workers - especially in this recession. Also, we have seen, with public sector hiring freezes and reductions (both provincial and national) of the previous twenty years have contributed high level of unemployment for youth and student.
I think that most economists agree that the only way to address youth unemployment (either through wage subsidies or through direct hiring) is through state intervention. The question is whether the current government is going to start listening to them.
One final point: Student unemployment and high tuition fees are definitely driving up student debt. This is one of the reasons that the government has reached its $15 billion debt ceiling on student debt 5 or so years before it expected to. It is also contributing to what we think is a large clime in education-related private debt loads. That is to say, that private debt to income ratio is only going to get worse.
It is a bleak picture for students and youth in this country and, as the privatization/marketization of education continues unabated, it will only get worse.