DOI: 10.5061/dryad.pg4f4qrnj
title: Canadian university syllabuses with academic and non-academic assigned readings identified.

description: In the context of the significant court battles that are being fought over
 the potential copyright infringement involved in distributing the articles
 and excerpts assigned to students in university courses, this study
 analyzes 3,391 course syllabuses (2015-2020) from nine provinces and 34
 universities across Canada. It identifies the types and proportions of
 required readings among academic and non-academic sources. Academic
 readings are assigned on 26.6 percent of the syllabuses, compared to 8.3
 percent of syllabuses for media articles and trade book chapters. Among
 the assigned readings, journal articles lead the list (with 54.3% of all
 readings), compared to scholarly book chapters (33.5%), media articles
 (6.0%), and trade book chapters (6.3%). The social sciences lead in the
 assignment of journal articles and the humanities in  trade book
 chapters, while science was least likely to have assigned readings of any
 type. The study also found that textbooks are required on a majority of
 syllabuses (66.0%), with only minor differences in this proportion across
 science, social sciences, and humanities. The data enable a further
 analysis at the page level of what the average student is asked to read
 annually, which, at the Access Copyright current tariff of $14.31
 (approved by the Canadian Copyright Board), amounts to a $0.021 per page.
 This rate is applied in a proposed new “three-step syllabus rule” that
 avoids double-charging students for academic materials (90.1% of readings
 by pages), while fairly compensating professional authors and their
 publishers (9.9%), with the data analyzed here suggesting a $1.40 annual
 charge per student for their assigned readings.
description: Using web-scraping strategies that attempted
 to target course syllabuses at Canadian universities, we collected 5,898
 documents from nine of Canada’s ten provinces (Table 1). Of these, 3,916
 proved to be unique syllabuses for the period 2015-2020. We eliminated 525
 of the syllabuses that referred to assigned readings but did not identify
 them (as they were to be found in a coursepack or on a website). This left
 3,391 syllabuses, of which 2,800 listed readings and/or textbooks, and 591
 of them having no required or assigned items, although these courses
 sometimes listed optional and recommended materials for the
 students.  These
 syllabuses<b> </b>come from 34 of Canada’s 96 universities
 located in nine of Canada’s ten provinces (minus Prince Edward Island).
 The distribution of syllabuses among institutions ran from a high of 386
 syllabuses (11.4% of total) collected from Western University to the two
 (0.1%) collected from Kwantlen Polytechnic University, with a mean of 99.7
 syllabuses per university. Of the 3,391 syllabuses, 86.3 percent (2,926)
 are in English and 13.7 percent (465) are in French. Courses in science
 accounted for 42.6 percent (1,443) of the syllabuses, the social sciences
 37.1 percent (1,258), and the humanities 20.3 percent (690). No
 distinction is made between graduate and undergraduate course syllabuses
 as the Access Copyright tariff applies to all university students. While
 we were unable to locate a reliable source of information on how many
 courses are taught in Canada annually, if Canada’s roughly 1.3 million
 full-time university students may be assumed to be taking 8.2 courses a
 year (see below fn 6) in classes averaging 25 students across the country,
 then this sample of 3,391 syllabuses amounts to less than 0.9 percent of
 the courses offered annually 2015-2020 (Postsecondary enrollments,
 2018).<b> </b>