Papers Presented at the 1st National NADEOSA Conference
Held 11-13 August 1999

Author:
Eve Horwitz Gray Juta Higher Education Publishing

Title:
Copyright – Taking the Debate Into Distance Education A Publisher's Perspective

Abstract:
The debate between DALRO, PASA and the higher education institutions about a possible change to the Regulations for Fair Dealing in the Copyright Act has generated a lot of heat, as have negotiations with DALRO around the introduction of blanket licences for institutional photocopying.

The higher education institutions, and particularly those involved in distance education are concerned about the fact that many students lack the means to purchase books, and are not able to access sufficient library resources for study purposes. They therefore plead for high limits to fair dealing provisions in the Copyright Regulations.

This paper argues that there are constructive ways in which the publishing industry, authors, academics and librarians can approach these problems of tertiary information provision by working in partnership with one another.

A major factor in the perceived high cost of locally published books is, in fact, the high level of photocopying in South African higher education, and the shortened print runs that result. We have a publishing industry that could provide the necessary resources for much of the higher education system at a lower cost than photocopying, if the various players were to combine forces to tackle together the provision of modularised, flexible learning resources in the new higher education system.

At the same time, new developments in information provision, particularly in the electronic domain, are radically changing the nature of academic information provision, and are challenging the traditional roles of author, publisher, librarian and education provider. We need to find imaginative new ways of working within this environment to position South African higher education and South African academic information delivery for the needs of students in the new millenium.

About the Author:

Eve Gray – a brief CV
Eve Gray took her undergraduate and Honours degrees in English and French at Rhodes University. For the next eighteen years, she lived in Europe, working as a teacher and lecturer in England and Luxembourg, and then as a translator and editor in Brussels. Returning to South Africa in 1982, she took her Masters Degree in English Literature at Wits University, where she subsequently lectured in the Department of English. In 1989, she was made Director of Wits University Press. Since 1995, she has worked at Juta Publishing in Cape Town, where she currently manages the Higher Education publishing list and is Publishing Director of UCT Press.

The debate between DALRO, PASA, and the higher education institutions about the Regulations covering Fair Dealing in the Copyright Act has been characterised by a climate of heightened emotions, inflamed rhetoric and the generation of a good deal of hostility on all sides. I have no desire to re-open this debate, but wish rather to move the discussion to more positive terrain. What can publishers; authors; academics and librarians; and the distance education institutions do together to achieve what is, after all, a common goal: the delivery of high quality, relevant and appropriate learning and research material for students who are often disadvantaged and unable to afford high prices for their textbook and resource materials? What can we do about students who live in remote areas, ill-served by libraries and lacking access to electronic on-line resources?

I would argue very strongly that the answer is not to maintain a high level of photocopying to serve the needs of these students. I believe we can find better ways of meeting student needs, by forming strong partnerships between the institutions and private sector publishing; between academics, librarians, publishers and authors.

It is interesting, just as an example, to note the reaction of the British Publishers Association to the high level of photocopying in South Africa. The Executive Director of the British Publishers Association, Ian Taylor, wrote in 1996:

British Publishers that know the South African market, regard the level of unauthorized photocopying as exceptionally high; on a par with Argentina and worse than Turkey. Reports suggest that an average tertiary institution the clear majority of students are using photocopied materials rather than purchased textbooks. It is notable that this practice is not confined to low- income groups, but is equally common among wealthier students.

He goes on to say-

British publishers are aware that some students in South Africa do not have sufficient funds to purchase imported textbooks, or even any books at all, but we would suggest that the solution is not to require publishing companies, whether South Africa or foreign, to provide an effective subsidy.

The response of the British Trade Delegation to the situation in South Africa was instructive. They raised the issue with Minister Bengu, suggesting that he should approach the EU for funds. The result was the EU Library donation project, that is putting R40 million of books and resources, as well as library training and development, into tertiary libraries in South Africa.

South African publishers share the same approach. We would rather work in partnership with the institutions to solve the problems facing disadvantaged students, than engage in a stand-off that could only harm our ability to deliver a good education to all students in difficult circumstances. We do not believe that the answer is to ask authors and publishers to subsidise the provision of learning resources by allowing high levels of photocopying; rather, we would suggest that there are viable solutions to be found.

My paper today will suggest some ways in which we could do this, not as a way of closing the debate, but rather to open a dialogue that might take us forward.

The value of a higher education publishing industry

Because so much heat, and indeed hatred, has been generated by the discussion around copyright, I would like to start out, very briefly, by discussing the value of an academic publishing industry in a country like South Africa. I find it very strange to stand here, conscious of the fact that the publishing industry is the butt of continual hostility among the very community we are dedicated to serving. Perhaps there are historical reasons: I will return to these; however, I think the real reason for this hostility is often ignorance about the way publishing works and who it benefits.

First of all, it must be made clear that copyright laws are there primarily to protect the rights of authors. Our authors have put considerable effort and money into developing the textbooks and readings that we publish. They deserve a return. Ironically, in the case of higher education publishing, the authors are academics. In other words, publishers and academics should be on the same side of the barricades.

The other point that I would like to make is that textbook authors of successful textbooks can do very well. Contrary to rumour, South Africa publishers pay high royalties (I shall return to this) and authors do not deserve to have the fruits of their labour exploited without any returns for them.

It is the British who again supply us with the most cogent discussion of the role that academic publishers can play in the higher education sector. This is because of the research undertaken for the Dearing Commission on higher education in the UK. Here are some points from this research:

• Higher Education institutions are under extreme pressure both financially and logistically, as budgets are cut even as pressure is placed upon them to produce new models of education delivery. Likewise, students are under considerable pressure as a result of the inadequacy of funding for tuition and resource provision. In this environment it is essential that resources such as essential teaching and research materials must be made available as efficiently and cost effectively as possible

• "All experience shows that to try to provide quality, competitive, up-to-date materials outside a competitive commercial framework is actually counter productive."

• The involvement of private sector publishers allows the considerable financial investment and risk involved in the development of higher education book and learning resource provision to be placed outside the higher education institutions themselves.

• Publishers, being commercially driven, and needing to achieve a fair return on investment, are subject to commercial discipline, and are therefore driven to produce good value and avoid wastefulness.

• As publishers address the entire market, and not only single institutions, they are more likely to achieve the economies of scale that allow for books and learning materials to be produced as affordably as possible.

• There is a common misconception that all publishers do is assess a manuscript and then have it printed, making it available through bookshops. It is also commonly assumed that publishers automatically make profits and the risk element in publishing is commonly underrated.

• Publishers have considerable skills in market assessment. They have to evaluate as accurately as possible what the potential market for a book is likely to be and then ensure that the print run is geared to achieve market penetration without exposing the publisher to excessive risk in long-term warehousing and stock holding. Publishers have to judge the balance between the price and the volume of production of titles in order to optimise the market. This is accentuated by the very steep curve in the price of books linked to the print run. If more than 5000 books are printed, the price is substantially lower than for shorter print runs. Nevertheless, publishers are aware of the need to serve smaller, more specialised academic markets and therefore have to balance their lists between major first year undergraduate titles and the less viable shorter-run specialist titles.

• In order to make these strictly economic decisions with accuracy, publishers need to be professionally skilled at evaluating market needs and designing titles to meet these needs. This involves a knowledge not only of the market, but also of the discipline involved, of changes in curriculum and learning methods in the market, of current trends in academic disciplines, and of specialist local needs. This is particularly important in South Africa right now, as we grapple with a new system of higher education delivery.

• Because they have to interface with the whole market, publishers tend to have a broader knowledge of the market environment in a particular discipline than is likely to be held within individual institutions. Once a market has been evaluated and market needs have been established, publishers have to be able to work with teams of authors and other specialists in order to create a text of maximum value in relation to the market needs.

• This knowledge extends not only to the content of the book, but also to the presentation and design of the book. Publishers need to be able to control the publishing and printing process to create a quality product which is properly geared in terms of its design and durability to the market which it addresses. This means that the publisher has to interface with a number of specialist technical disciplines in order to deliver typographic design, illustration levels, interactive pedagogic qualities, and the right level of instructional design. All this has to be achieved at a cost which allows the book to be sold at a price which is affordable to the student who provides the ultimate market.

• The publisher also has to have editorial and pedagogic skills in ensuring that the language level is appropriate to the needs of the students involved. In South Africa, a further need is to make sure that any text is culturally sensitive to the diversity of our country. Relevance and appropriateness are of high value in the changing environment in South Africa now, and publishers have to be tuned into this with great sensitivity and a good deal of knowledge.

South Africa has by far the largest publishing industry in Africa. Unlike other African countries we are equipped to provide a considerable volume of appropriate material for the higher education sector. However, the success of the industry and its ability to deliver the right product at the right price is being eroded by an excessively high level of photocopying, particularly in the tertiary sector.

A culture of photocopying in the tertiary institutions

As a response to the academic boycott and to student disadvantage, many tertiary institutions have relied very heavily on photocopied course packs as the only resource material supplied to or recommended to students. The situation was compounded in distance learning institutions which, at least for some courses, argued (and some still argue) that the students needed nothing more than the course materials supplied by the lecturer.

This is the tip of the iceberg: below the surface lies the resistance of a bookless culture to the idea of reading as a necessary academic re source.

 The cost of photocopying to the publishing industry

Thus, in the past in South Africa, the most common solution to the problem of providing information to disadvantaged students has been the provision of photocopied course packs provided by the institution and made up of a mixture of readings from academic monographs, published collections of readings and journal articles. Sometimes these course packs have included photocopied extracts from textbooks, as well.

For a long time, this practice continued in a number of academic institutions, without any clearance of copyright permissions, while other institutions have been scrupulous about observing intellectual property rights. This was, and still is, accompanied by widespread illegal photocopying of textbooks by students, of both local and international publications.

In 1994, a survey by a British Trade Delegation to South Africa estimated that more than half the students in tertiary institutions in South Africa do not buy their textbooks but use photocopied material instead. It was calculated at the time that this cost British publishing companies and their authors between , 15 and , 20 million annually. For the South African industry, a similar calculation would indicate a loss of some R100 to R150 million at today’s values. The local publishing industry probably suffers more from student photocopying, while course packs contain more international material.

Our discussion in this forum, however, includes only the photocopying carried out by the tertiary institutions themselves. The heart of the debate concerns the question of multiple copying, both for course packs and for library use. Given that the majority of our students are disadvantaged, and given that in distance institutions, many students do not have access to a properly stocked library, are the limitations placed on photocopying fair? How can the institutions abide by the law and still give their students adequate course material and readings?

A few points need to be clarified at the outset. There can, of course be a debate around whether it would be fair to allow one per cent, or five per cent, or ten per cent of a book to be copied, and I imagine that this debate could keep us busy for a long time with heated vituperation of one another. However, this is obscuring an essential issue. Clive Bradley, of the British Publisher’s Association, makes an essential distinction, that is, oddly enough, often ignored:

There is a considerable difference between permitting a licensee to make a copy or copies for his her own internal or private purposes (a from of secondary or subsidiary use) and permitting use amounting to republishing, for example, systematic document delivery service, the production of ‘course packs’ for sale to students, or republishing of compilations of abstracts from learned articles, usually paid for by sale of the copies either on fully commercial terms or for a non-profit payment. Such republishing is a primary act of exploitation which competes with the original product.

He goes on to say:

There seems to be no very good reason why a compiler of what is essentially a new product should not be subject to the same disciplines of not using someone else’s property without permission.

Respect for intellectual property rights

In fact, I do not think we really disagree about this. As authors; as distance education institutions which make a considerable investment in the development of course material; as publishers; none of us wants to see the fruits of our labour or investment appropriated by someone else. The national Department of Education has put itself squarely behind the respect for intellectual property and has urged institutions to join a blanket licensing system. Naledi Pandor, launching a conference of the Copyright Regulations in Gauteng last year, endorsed government support for the intorduction of a blanket licence scheme and stressed the importance of respect for intellectual property rights.

The problem is really the pressure exerted by student poverty, by inadequate library resourcing; and by institutional budget cuts. The question is: how do we square this circle?

The price of books

One of the major arguments advanced against the use of published resources by students is the price of books. Students cannot afford to buy books, it is argued. That may be the case in relation to imported books, although many leading international textbook publishers discount their books very heavily into the South African market in International Student Editions sold at not much more than cost.

But South Africa possesses the largest publishing industry in Africa, an industry that is capable of producing books of international quality at much lower prices than the price of imported books. At least for all the larger undergraduate courses, we ought to be able to produce local textbooks and readers to serve this market at an affordable price. Our books are very much cheaper than most imported books, and yet the price still seems too high for many students.

Are local books really expensive? And why are local books not cheaper?

1. The major reason for the relatively high price of local books is the high level of photocpoying in South Africa, because so much of the volume of our potential sales is lost to photocopying.
2. The price of books is heavily dependent on the print run: the higher the print run, the lower the price. The reason USA textbooks are relatively so cheap is because the publishers are able to print a minimum of 10 000 books in any print run.
3. If a South African publisher can sell between 5 000 and 10 000 copies of an average textbook, the cost of the book to the student, per page, is lower than the cost of photocopying (even excluding rights fees). In other words, books are cheaper than photocopies, and often very much cheaper than photocopies, provided that we can achieve adequate print runs.
4. If half the students in a class of 10 000 students countrywide were to buy a 350 page book, then the price of the book would be in the region of R100. If all the students bought it, it would cost R75. If it were to be supplied directly with students’ course material, so that the risk was reduced for the publisher, the price would be discounted further to around R60. (The standard at the moment is that for many courses, only one third of the class, or fewer, buy the book. Engineering courses are an honourable exception). The fact is that very few South African textbooks sell more than 3 to 4000 copies a year in current circumstances.

If South African institutions and students were to stop photocopying, the price of books would come down dramatically.

5. A further contributing factor in the price of South African tertiary books is the very high level of royalties paid to authors. Where the international standard for an international academic author’s royalties would be between 8% and 10%, South African authors are paid between 15% and 25%. This gets added straight on to the price of the book. The level of royalty payments is an index of the leverage exerted on the academic market by the size of the two major distance education institutions in South Africa and the number of students that their authors control.

The cost of photocopying: is photocopying really cheaper than books?

The argument put forward for high levels of photocopying is that it is the cheapest way of getting information to students. Where copyright fees are not paid, then obviously, this reduced price is being funded by authors and publishers.

But photocopying, even illegal photocopying, is not cheap.

1. Institutional photocopying carries a high level of hidden costs. For higher education institutions, now facing increasingly stringent financial constraints, photocopying is, in fact, very expensive. Some five or six years ago, Wits University calculated that the photocopying of course packs was costing the university some R2 million a year in largely hidden costs, for hardware, paper and staff time. Legalising its photocopying in fact probably saved money, in spite of the high level of copyright fees paid, as the review of photocopying practice revealed much wastefulness and led to a radical rethinking of the role of photocopies in resource provision. Wits landed up photocopying less, and more effectively.
2. The truth is that photocopying comes from different budgets and that is why it is perceived to be cheaper. The advantage of course packs is often not really that they are cheaper, but that they are paid for as part of student fees.
3. Where photocopying and course packs are cheaper and more effective are for small classes, where specialised knowledge is needed in an environment where commercial publication is not a viable option.
4. Providing books as part of the resource pack sent out to students would be one way of addressing the question of price. This would involve a radical review of the nature of the partnership between institutions, publishers and booksellers, but it is certainly worth exploring. A way would need to be found of funding the institutional purchase of books, and this might have to be borne by the publisher or bookseller, at least until the institution recovers costs from student fees.. Booksellers could not insist on their normal level of discount, but would have to lower their margins. But we all might be the winners.
5. When photocopied course packs are provided, the cost of the publication of resource material is borne by the institution. If a commercial publisher produces materials, the cost is borne outside the institution.
6. Even for distance learning institutions, there is advantage to be gained in not carrying the cost of reproducing readings and rather using resources available in the private sector. There is also room for more creative partnerships with commercial publishers to find the optimum way of producing distance learning materials. Because publishers have to work to very tight cost and profit margins, we have found that we tend to produce course materials at a much lower cost than many institutional course production units.

1. As local academic publishers, we are heavily invested in the delivery of appropriate materials for the requirements of new, modularised, cross-curricular courses for the changing higher education environment.
2. We are also familiar with the need for piloting new courses, and have worked with institutions which have needed to put out a pilot print run in order to firm up a new course before settling for a final product. The delivery of flexibility in a changing environment is something that we have to deliver wherever we can.

1. The main factor in the price of local books is the level of photocopying.
2. One way, therefore, of bringing down the price of books, would be for academics, publishers and government authorities to join as partners in a campaign to raise awareness of the value of books and to promote a reading culture in our tertiary institutions.
3. The fragmentation of major courses in universities, with radical differences between one institution and the next, is another factor in increasing the price of local books (including course readers). If some standardisation could be achieved, then textbooks and readers could be produced that served a number of institutions, increasing print runs and bringing down prices. Technikons, which have introduced a national curriculum, benefit from considerably lowered book prices.
4. Where institutions buy in bulk, the price comes down even further. Involving the booksellers in discussions around different profit margins for bulk supply could expand this advantage.
5. While acknowledging the need to respect academic autonomy, I would argue that it is perfectly possible to agree a corpus of knowledge that is necessary in, say, a first-year psychology course and have it apply to at least the majority of institutions. This is in any event implicit in the new higher education policy, with registered unit standards and the requirement of lateral transferability of qualifications. This would bring down the price of books considerably, by creating large enough markets for local publishers to develop books for courses that have, up until now, not been viable local markets.

A good textbook

Higher education institutions are arguing that students cannot afford textbooks. It has been argued that textbooks do not provide the flexibility and range of knowledge needed by student in areas poorly served by libraries. The distance institutions have often argued that one set of course materials should provide the student with both textbook and the institutional course notes.

In this argument, there is perhaps some confusion between the nature of a good textbook and distance course materials. A really good textbook (and I do not mean the publication of a lecturer’s course notes, but something much more developed) can be the answer to many of the student’s needs.

International research has suggested that the single factor most likely to produce success rates in learning is the provision of a good textbook. This is even more so where the availability of good teachers is limited. Given the poor throughput rates in many of our institutions, we could do worse than taking this seriously.

The history of textbook publishing has, however produced its distortions. South Africa has a higher percentage of distance students than anywhere else in the world. (35% of the public higher education sector is in two distance education institutions, UNISA and TechnikonSA). As a result, the textbook market has been very dependent on these two institutions for its markets. Thus, there has, in the past, been a tendency to produce textbooks that are essentially distance learning course notes. Authorship was often drawn only from within the institution. This has at times led to resistance to local textbooks from some other institutions, and questions have been raised about the quality of some of the books on the market.

This has changed radically in the last few years. If a good textbook is to provide a student with the range and depth of information needed, it will draw from the best authors available, across a range of institutions. It will include more than the minimum information, but will offer a variety of perspectives, the dialectic of academic debate. In this way, a good textbook will contain the potential for flexible learning and teaching. It should be usable in more than one course, covering the subject matter rather than the intended course.

Increasingly, we are also drawing on authors from outside South Africa, particularly for African scholars working in African countries and in the UK and USA. The ultimate aim is to give the student a tool that includes both local relevance and access to global intellectual debates. Of vital importance is the sensitivity of local textbooks to the language requirements of entry-level students in particular.

In many cases, a book can cover more than one year of study, taking a student through an entire course of study.

How to achieve flexibility in content delivery through textbooks

Given the availability of good textbooks, the identity and brandmarking of individual institutions then comes from the selection the individual institution makes from a book that contains more than the basic requirements of the course. In the case of distance education institutions, this flexibility is contained in the course notes and tutorial guides provided for the student, as well as in assessments and case studies.

I would therefore argue that the beginning of the answer to our dilemma lies in the delivery of good textbook resources, developed in partnership between publishers and academic institutions and authors. This is in fact implicit in government recommendations for materials development in the distance education sector in ‘centres of excellence’ nationwide.

This process does not necessarily exclude the use of international textbook materials. It is possible to adapt international books for local use, where markets are large enough. The provision of academic books for smaller specialised courses is likely, however to remain in the hands of international publishers.

But the provision of textbooks alone is not enough for the distance education institutions, which face the problem of students who have little or no access to libraries. Hence the perceived need to photocopy reading packs, which are now looking very expensive with copyright fees added in. I would argue, though, that answer does not lie in fighting limitations on the right to photocopy free of charge.

Course readers

Course readers are an essential feature of the distance education scene, as they provide students with an overview of up-to-date relevant material incorporating all the major debates in the subject field.

One argument for the photocopying of readings is precisely the ability to produce the most recent journal articles every year. However, the question is whether the production of annual photocopied course packs by the institution are the most effective way of providing these readings.

The standard range of readings, those that are repeated from year to year, can be published by a commercial publisher (the Open University in the UK is the most obvious model of this practice). Then photocopied readings can be supplied for a much smaller volume of readings: those that are the most current, or the most ephemeral.

The publication of a book of course readings, especially if it can be used over several courses or across institutions, provides considerable economies of scale, as well as being a less ephemeral product for students, more esthetically appealing and more user-friendly.

An example from Wits can illustrate this point. When it came to clearing permissions, the Department of Sociology found that an entire section of its readings on labour sociology came from books published by Ravan Press. Ravan was approached, and a book of readings was published, to the satisfaction of the academics, the students, and the publisher. The book was included in the departmental surcharge for course notes and the students felt that they were getting very good value, while the department benefited from bulk prices for a captive market.

Other models are provided by British and American schemes for on-line course pack delivery to campus bookstores. Readings are stored digitally, and academic departments can select those that they need and pay a licence fee accordingly.

The regional consortia of tertiary institutions, with their on-line library delivery schemes provide another possibility, although only where students have access to a library.

Academic journals

A lot of readings needed for students are likely to be drawn from academic journals. Scholarly journals are operating in a changing and unstable environment, because of changes in the delivery systems of scholarly material. The cost of subscriptions to paper journals has gone up steadily; and the number of journals has proliferated, at the same time as the university libraries have seen a steady erosion of their budgets. Where major libraries used to stock all the relevant journals, worldwide, there have been massive cancellations of subscriptions to journals, even in the best-resourced countries. The journals business is in crisis.

While many journals have moved to on-line delivery, as a response to this crisis, a lack of standardisation of delivery systems, as well as academic preferences, have prevented the demise of print-on-paper journals. According to a 1994 report by the Association of American Universities and the Association of Research libraries, scholarly information needed to be treated in three categories:

• The traditional ‘classical’ print-based model
• The "modernised" parallel publishing model, and
• An "emergent" model that bypasses print

It looks as though print will remain the dominant model until at least the year 2015, and beyond. We are still a long way from purely electronic delivery of journal information, and, as a result, journals will remain expensive: too expensive for most African countries.

In the electronic environment, the crucial question for publishers is how to preserve their traditional role in scholarly publishing, and that they do through managing and certifying the quality of scholarship through the peer review process. For librarians, as for South African distance education institutions, the critical question is how to meet requirements for information in multiple formats out of shrinking budgets. To meet these needs:

• Publishers have begun to develop licensing schemes. This allows for the full use of journal materials, in print and electronic form, including copying, and use in course packs.
• Librarians have developed purchasing consortia, either on a membership or a regional basis. The library is then able to use licensed journal material from certain publishers within the consortium for the provision of course packs, charging the extra cost on to the end user. This requires a shift in our conception of the role of the library in the institution.

(This debate draws on an article by John Cox, ‘The great journals crisis: a complex present, but a collegial future’, in Logos, Volume 9, Issue 1, 1998, and Pieter SH Bolman, ‘Journals face the electronic future’, in Logos, Volume 7, Issue 1, 1996.)

Interestingly, John Cox, of Carfax Publishing, in his article on journals publishing, concludes:

The basic change is from an adversarial to a partner relationship. Publishers need to be more flexible in meeting the legitimate demands by libraries to deliver the information they publish in acceptable form. Librarians, on the other hand, need to concede that effective negotiation requires a centralised, well-briefed office with authority to negotiate on behalf of a purchasing group.

In the South African context, libraries seem less involved in course pack delivery than overseas.

Licensing of content as a solution in distance education

There are also some signs of an emerging change in the nature of the relationship between publishers and institutions. For example, as publishers, we have been negotiating the granting of licences to private distance institutions that wish to deliver content from our published books in an adapted form, for their student course notes. This is proving cost-effective for the institution and still provides adequate rewards for author and publisher. The institution benefits from the value added by the publisher in materials development, editing and design, while the publisher expands market share. The course also benefits from the input of authorship from outside the institution; the introduction of a wider range of viewpoints.

In the licensing model, the content of the published book is seen as just that: content, capable of delivery in different media and different modes. This in itself provides for a good deal of flexibility.

A cyber-future?

I think we need to move away from our adversarial stances to a more collegial approach to solving problems, all the more urgently because radical changes in the whole nature of information delivery are looming which could change the whole nature of the relationship between authors, publishers, libraries, academics and institutions. By the time we have negotiated a licensing system for photocopying, that technology will begin to look old-fashioned.

Academic journals and scholarly monographs

Even as the publication of formally refereed journals in electronic media is taking off slowly and cautiously, the availability of academic information on the Internet is mushrooming. Increasingly, academics put their research onto the Internet, pre-publishing their work for their peers.

Given the range of academic material available free of charge on the Internet, we are surely moving into a world in which there will be increasing demands for the free availability of information in a medium that has developed a rhetoric of democratic non-commercialism. This sits paradoxically with the parallel development of the Internet as a prime commercial site, which delivers information instantaneously and often more cheaply than through regular channels.

This environment poses challenges to authors and publishers alike. For academic authors, there might be a reconsideration of copyright protection for research material that does not have direct commercial value. In other words, to circle back to the copyright argument with which we opened, the pressure might be on authors to provide scholarly research to the academic and student market without the expectation of commercial gain. Scholarly authors, the argument goes, are paid from public funds to conduct their research. There is therefore an obligation to make that research available to students and an impoverished scholarly community, free of charge. Much academic knowledge, it is argued, is of importance to very small markets. The value to academics in the publication of research work comes, not from royalties, but from career advancement and tenure.

This, of course, is not possible if the intervention of an expensive traditional publishing process is required to disseminate the information. It is here that we may have to completely re-think our ideas about how information reaches its end user, and what the roles of the respective players ought to be.

In this scenario, it is the commercial value of intellectual property rights that prevails: in other words, more protection is awarded to commercially valuable knowledge, and less to knowledge that does not have commercial value. This is a fairly threatening concept, and would require a radical re-think of the nature of copyright.

The implications of the electronic revolution in the broader publishing environment

More broadly, the implications for publishers are that we might well be moving away from the idea of the book as a manufactured product, to the concept of knowledge as a continuum of information, to be provided in flexible form, to very short delivery lines.

This would challenge not only traditional ways of publishing , but also the whole delivery chain.

We might face a situation in which users no longer want to pay for the content of courses, but will rather use public domain information and pay for accreditation and certification. Publishers, in partnership with academic authors and editors, may well become the compilers of information banks, providing a service in sifting an inchoate mass of information on the Internet and adding value by classifying, adding search engines and editing.

If the commercial value of knowledge is in accreditation and not information provision, then publishers and academic institutions will find themselves in very different partnerships. We need to grapple now with what these partnerships might look like.

Electronic storage for on-line print delivery

However, for quite a while to come, given the lack of telephone links and of computer hardware, we will continue to rely on print as the ultimate technology for delivery.

We are likely to be using electronic media for storage and delivery, including delivery to remote sites, where student material can be printed down in regional centres.

Perhaps we should be focusing our energies on grappling with this very exciting future, and making it work for us.

Conclusion

It is clear that what is needed involves a close partnership between all the players in the provision of knowledge resources for students. This is very much in line with the recommendations of the Commission on Higher Education, which envisioned ‘centres of excellence’ for the production of quality distance education learning materials; regional and national consortia to rationalise the delivery of higher education; and partnerships between the public and private sector to deliver higher education more effectively at a lower cost.

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