Opening door to plagiarists

BEING an academic is like driving a car. We can all do it but few of us knows how a car is manufactured. When something goes wrong, we phone the AA.

Similarly, as academics, we know how to write, but few have any idea how the publication value chain operates. When something goes wrong, we call the editor. The Academic and Non-Fiction Authors Association of South Africa is like the AA for authors – and there’s about to be a collision with the South African Copyright Amendment Bill.

The general consensus of a recently organised symposium attended by copyright lawyers, law professors, university presses, journal editors, copyright officers and other interested parties is that the proposed bill will hammer one more nail into the coffin of South Africa’s ailing university system.

The bill applies a very wide ranging definition of “fair use” on all materials to be used for “education”. Free access to information is the cry – but as always, someone is paying. By eliminating the rights of educational authors and publishers and making all published work “free” to be reproduced, the bill could alienate authors from the fruits of their labour and their right to be cited.

Section 12D of the bill allows for unrestricted copying of content “for educational and academic purposes” provided that the copying doesn’t exceed the length justified by the purpose (open to interpretation by a court).

The section also states that the “name of the author shall be indicated as far as is practicable”. This means it can be left out where not practicable, which opens the door to plagiarism.

There will be many negative effects if the bill’s amendments are accepted. Some of these are outlined in a study conducted by PwC which assessed the bill’s possible impacts on South Africa’s publishing industry.

The study found that if the bill is accepted as is proposed, the publishing industry will experience a 33% decline in sales. This could result in a R2.1 billion loss in revenue and 1 250 jobs will be lost in a country where the official unemployment rate is 27%.

What might happen under a reproduction without permission or royalty system? Publishers of both journals and books will institute hefty article processing charges and open access fees will be paid upfront.

This means that the cost of publication will no longer be absorbed by publishers. In this model, the author pays. And it’s an expensive business.

The subscription-driven “reader pays” model will decline, which means that economies of scale stretched across tens of thousands of subscribing libraries and millions of readers will be replaced with authors paying for readers to read.

Less work will be published as authors will need to access large sums of money from donors to pay for publication.

South Africa’s educational publishing industry will decline. This will put the brakes on the decolonising of curricula in academia because homegrown publishers publishing homegrown content will have difficulty entering into the market.

The country will again become reliant on expensive international imports written for international readers.

The proposed bill will not only be harmful to authors but to the sustenance of scholarly innovation and cultural development.