John Willinsky of Stanford & UBC on "The Intellectual Properties of Learning and Changing Political Economy of Technology in Canada"

Everyone who reads this blog will want to watch a talk by  John Willinksy, a Canadian, who is now a Professor of education at Stanford but who keeps some ties with UBC and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He looks at the issue of open access, IP, etc. from high up in the sky but with very high-resolution vision.

It's a really excellent lecture just given at U Vic entitled "The Intellectual Properties of Learning and Changing Political Economy of Technology in Canada".

It deals with open access, CRKN, Access Copyright, course packs, STEM cell research, etc. etc. It gets really interesting at about the 44+ minute mark on Access Copyright, the SCC decision, etc. He gets some of the legal details a bit wrong but not seriously so. Overall, it's terrific, impassioned, well-informed and - above all - addressed to educators, researchers, librarians, policy makers and those who really matter (i.e. not copyright lawyers).

There's an interesting question at the end from the Associate Dean of Engineering about the threat of "predatory journals" and funding issues - and a somewhat testy interchange. Willinksy gets the better of it, I think.

Here’s the link.

On the issue of “predatory journals”, see this important recent piece in Nature. If these predatory journals are a really serious problem, I am confident that the academy will quickly marginalize them and that there will be strong disincentives to publishing in them or citing to them.

HPK