What Should Students Pay for University Course Readings?: An Empirical, Economic, and Legal Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The digital transformation of knowledge dissemination and academic publishing have sparked copyright disputes in the educational sector related to the scope of fair dealing. This study contributes (a) an empirical basis for such discussions by analyzing 3,391 course syllabuses (2015–2020) from 34 Canadian universities, and (b) a potential resolution to the disputes to which this analysis is applied. Among the reading types, 26.6% of the syllabuses had readings from academic sources, while 8.3% of the syllabuses had media articles and trade book chapters (with some overlap). The syllabus data are used to calculate a per-page royalty charge, which is used to demonstrate a proposed three-step syllabus rule to avoid double-chargingstudents for academic materials (amounting to 90.1% of readings by pages), while fairly compensating professional authors and their publishers (9.9% of readings by pages). The three-step syllabus rule provides a sound rationale for charging each student $1.40 per year to cover royalty charges for readings assigned in Canadian university courses.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".