Contributor
Access Copyright, the group that licenses content for course kits, proposed earlier this year to increase their per-student fee 13-fold. The move has caused many universities across Canada—York included, as of August 31—to opt out of their contract with them.
“They proposed a tariff to the Copyright Board,” says Patricia Lynch, copyright officer at York. “The [fee of] $45 per student is quite a hike from [the previous fee of] $3.38.”
Lynch says universities across the country assessed their reliance on paper and electronic material. York was one of the many schools that decided to end their deal with Access Copyright.
“This decision was made based on the depth of [York’s] libraries, open access, creative commons,” she says. “It was a good decision to make preparations to move away from Access Copyright come September 1.”
Access Copyright has provided licensing services to Canada’s universities since 1988. As of last year, the going rate was $3.38 per student plus 10 cents per page in course kits.
Instead, Access Copyright proposed that universities pay $45 per student, with no per-page fee. With York at an all-time high enrolment of more than 45,600 full-time students, the proposed fee increase would bring the annual cost from approximately one million dollars to around $2.1 million.
Lynch feels the current model was an outdated one that held most relevance in a world of print, and sees this move as a progressive one for York.
“Really, when you put all the conditions of the tariffs along with the money, it certainly didn’t seem like an advantageous place for a university that wants to move forward in different areas,” she says.
For York bookstore director Steven Glassman, leaving Access Copyright means a lot less red tape processing to deal with.
“With Access Copyright we were required to do an extensive amount of accounting and logging,” he recounts. “It required us to submit logs in exactly the way they wanted it, and it included for each line item how many original pages and whether it was an original source, because you’re only allowed to copy a certain percentage [of an entire book].”
Lynch is sure that more academic materials will be making the transition to online versions in the near future.
“More and more [materials] are going online. For the next few years we’ll see a hybrid where things are part paper and part online, moving very quickly to all online,” she predicts.
