Canadian university syllabuses with academic and non-academic assigned readings identified.

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.