spillover from the years of proximity to and dependance on international publishers

within the larger journals initiative, which is seen as both as a blessing and a
curse. It reinforces the existing closed-access structures of academic journal
publishing even as it grants free access to literature that would be cost
prohibitive for many universities and research institutions in Bengal.

Student Practices

The preceding sections focused on institutional factors shaping print and digital
access to educational materials in Brazil, from the role of photocopying and
debates over copyright infringement to the expanding ecosystem of digital content
providers and open licensing initiatives. As in the other country studies in this
book, we also con-ducted focus groups and a survey to better understand how
students access and share materials in the midst of this transition. As in the
other surveys, we focused on feilds with very different curricular requirements
and, consequently, significant differences in student practices: medicine,
communication studies, and law.
In our case, the survey is based on a representative sample of the population
of undergraduates in the three fields in the city of Rio de Janerio, the second
largest in the country.94 The focus on Rio means that we cannot generalize results
to Brazil as whole -though we can make some informed guesses about the role of
geographic differences. In general, we expect reliance on photocopying and
unauthorized downloading to be stronger outside large metropolitan areas, which
tend to have better infrastructure for legal access.

Means of Access

As in the other surveys, we asked students about how much of their materials were
purchased new,purchased used,photocopied and downloaded. These percentages combine
tranches from different student groups and sodonot add up to one hundred. But they
do offer a rough, eloquent impression of relative importance of a given means of
access to materials, compared to other means. Libraries were not part of this
series of questions. we address them in more detail in a later section.
Photocopies are the primary means of access to educational materials for students
in medicine (38 percent) and communication studies (44 percent) students, followed
by Inernet downloads (24 percent and 29 percent, respectively) and purchasing new
books(24 percent and 19 percent). For reasons that we will explore, law students
described a very different set of practices, with new book purchases the main
strategy for acquiring