Archive for August 2007

The Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog has a nice summary of a series of postings by Peter Murray-Rust of the Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge, exploring how different scientific journals implement free and open access to their content.  This illustrates how, as with open course materials, open access journal content is licensed in a variety of ways, allowing a different set of downstream uses.

In the wake of Yale’s announcement, Berkeley has come forward to reaffirm its institutional membership in BioMed Central. From the statement:

In 2006, the California Digital Library (CDL) negotiated a “supporters membership” for the UC system, where the libraries pay a flat rate so that authors can take advantage of a 15% discount on article processing charges when publishing in the BMC open access journals… In the last 12 months, Berkeley researchers have published 50 articles in BMC journals. The member discount also applies to Berkeley authors who publish in Chemistry Central and PhysMath Central open access journals. The libraries are happy to continue supporting our researchers’ use of these open access resources.

(via Open Access News)

William Patry gives his take on the lifting of one of the darkest clouds hanging over open source software.  The New York Times covered this as well.  A judge recently ruled that SCO, a software company, had no claim to some of the underlying code in UNIX, contrary to its long-held assertion.

This claim has been one reason many companies had been skittish about open source software–the nightmare scenario being they would wake up to find out one day that the software they thought was open source was actually proprietary and suddenly have to pay steep licensing fees.

While an exact analogy for open education would be problematic, the scenario is nonetheless instructive, as it’s not a stretch, given the current liberal intellectual property practices of many faculty, to imagine some materials under full copyright might slip–intentionally or not–into supposedly openly-licensed materials, exposing downstream users to some risk.

I’m not a lawyer, so this may not be an exactly accurate reading of potential risk, but one of the more interesting ways this might happen with content is through application of fair use.  Materials protected by full copyright might legitimately be included in an open publication in the context of fair use (a careful publisher would note the full copyright status of such materials).  Downstream users mistaking them as openly licensed, however, might remix the materials into a different context that is not defensible under fair use, thus exposing themselves to litigation.

This is just one illustration of the many complexities surrounding open licensing of content.

On Friday, August 10th, Open Access News carried another in their series of posts on a proposed Open Access mandate for the National Institutes of Health. OAN has been tracking a measure that’s made its way through the House supporting this concept, and this post is an editorial supporting the measure.

The numbers in the Honolulu Advertiser editorial are compelling. $28 billion a year in tax money supports research at NIH, which generates some 60,000 published studies, the vast majority of which end up in subscription-based journals for which universities pay top dollar to access.

This report by Eldis is one of the best primers I’ve read recently on the World Summit on the Information Society and the major players in world ICT policy. It has, I’m sure, its own biases but it provides good background on the summit, UNESCO, WIPO, UNDP and many of the other players in this space. If you have an open education project and you are seeking to develop a better understanding of how OER might play a role in global development, this is worth the time to read. I am interested to see that there are at least 10 WSIS activities discussed in the Tunis Agenda for which OER might play an important role:

• Building ICT capacity for all and confidence in the use of ICTs by all – including youth, older persons, women, indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, and remote and rural communities – through the improvement and delivery of relevant education
  and training programmes and systems including lifelong and distance learning.
• Implementing effective training and education, particularly in ICT science and technology, that motivate and promote participation
  and active involvement of girls and women in the decision-making process of building the information society.
• Improving access to the world’s health knowledge and telemedicine services, in particular in areas such as global cooperation in
  emergency response, access to and networking among health professionals to help improve quality of life and environmental conditions.
• Using ICTs to improve access to agricultural knowledge, combat poverty, and support production of and access to locally relevant agriculture-related content.
• Supporting educational, scientific, and cultural institutions, including libraries, archives and museums, in their role of developing, providing equitable, open and affordable access to, and preserving diverse and varied content, including in digital form, to support informal and formal education, research and innovation; and in particular supporting libraries in their public service role of providing free and equitable access to information and of improving ICT literacy and community connectivity, particularly in underserved communities.
• Enhancing the capacity of communities in all regions to develop content in local and/or indigenous languages.
• Strengthening the creation of quality e-content, on national, regional and international levels.
• Promoting the use of traditional and new media in order to foster universal access to information, culture and knowledge for all people, especially vulnerable populations and populations in developing countries and using, inter alia, radio and television as educational and learning tools.
• Promoting the development of advanced research networks, at national, regional and international levels, in order to improve collaboration in science, technology and higher education.
• Digitising our historical data and cultural heritage for the benefit of future generations.

(via Information Policy)

Accessibility is a challenging issue for open educaitonal resources. Because OER are often not part of accredited programs but rather derivatives thereof, they are not held to the same accessibility standards as online course materials (at least in the US). Nonetheless, producers of OER are acutely aware that OER can present unique opportunities for persons with disabilities to access educational materials otherwise unavailable to them.

I’ve yet to meet a producer of OER who didn’t want to meet the maximum possible standard of accessibility that was practical given the costs of doing so. As with everything else, meeting accessibility standards becomes a tradeoff between format and volume. Projects can publish at higher volume with less accessability, and in meeting higher standards of accessibility, end up publishing at lower volume. This is a difficult tradeoff, especially knowing that materials that don’t meet the highest standards of accessibility often cannot be easily imported into the LMS systems of schools providing for-credit instruction.

…continues on David Wiley’s iterating toward openness blog. Here, David presents a four point explanation of why the new license he’s proposed is different that the CC By license. There are thought-provoking responses at the bottom of the explanation. For more on the reaction to David’s proposal, go here.

Educause Quarterly has come out with its top ten technology-related teaching and learning issues in higher education. Open education makes the list–barely–at number 7:

No. 7: Sharing Content, Applications, and Application Development

The issues facing academic technology units are increasingly complex and interdependent, requiring individuals and institutions to work together. Collaboration allows us to benchmark with our peers, develop affinity groups and consortia, and use resources more effectively.

Collaboration can be a fundamental strategy in higher education. Creating a culture of openness and sharing builds productive individual and institutional relationships that result in mutual benefit…

Two of the most compelling examples of successful collaboration are open source software and the open content movement…

Most of the discussion on this point is around open source technologies, only fair given Educause’s focus, but at least hopeful that open content was mentioned.

I mentioned earlier that Yale had dropped its support for BioMed Central. BMC responds in this release on their site. Again, the discussion is mostly economic. In an absolute sense, open access may be cheaper than traditional subscription, but as the response notes, libraries can’t just move from one to the other:

…the total amount currently spent by libraries on subscriptions would be sufficient to cover the cost of peer-reviewed open access publication for all research articles. Clearly, though, libraries cannot simply transfer their acquisitions budget from subscriptions to open access overnight, since access to the subscription-only archival content currently controlled by publishers is vital for their researchers.

This doesn’t address the question of whether open access journals have sufficient heft yet to attract submissions from the top researchers in the field, which I suspect is more of what ties libraries to the traditional and prestigious subscription-based journals than archival content (though again, I’m not intimately familiar with the issues of open access, so this is a view from the outside looking in). BMC however does map out a way for universities to generate a separate funding stream for open access journals:

Biomedical research funders around the world already spend billions of dollars to support research activity. These funders are understandably concerned to ensure that the results of that research are as widely disseminated as possible so that they obtain the good value from their research expenditure. For research to be worth doing, it must be read, used and built on — open access maximizes the opportunity for such use… It is not surprising therefore, that major biomedical research funders such as NIH and HHMI now encourage open access publication, and are willing to provide financial support for it.

Encouraging research funders to support open access publication solves the acknowledged problem of generating an alternate funding stream, and it also addresses the unacknowledged issue of prestige. There are encouraging signs that at least some funders are inclined to support this approach, but as with many things in open education, this appears to be moving at the pace of cultural change. In the mean time, stop-gaps such as the institutional membership scheme that BMC has put forth will have to have sufficiently compelling value propositions to keep the ball rolling. (via Open Access News)

Here’s an update on recent activities of the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Foundation, now three years old, created the Open Knowledge Definition, which it describes thusly:

The Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) provides an answer to the question: what is open knowledge? It puts forward, in a simple and clear manner, principles that define open knowledge and which open knowledge licenses must satisfy.

The concept of openness has already started to spread rapidly beyond its original roots in academia and software. We already have ‘open access’ journals, open genetics, open geodata, open content etc. As the concept spreads so we are seeing a proliferation of licenses and a potential blurring of what is open and what is not.

In such circumstances it is important to preserve compatibility, guard against dilution of the concept, and provide a common thread to this multitude of activities across a variety of disciplines. The definition, by providing clear set of criteria for openness, is an essential tool in achieving these ends.

…to David Wiley’s windup: The release of a new OpenContent License draft. At first you might be thinking “Why another open license?” but as David explains the point is to reduce license incompatibility by providing a license that can be used with materials under other open licenses.

The preamble is a great explanation of the issues surrounding open licenses, remix and reuse. He’s right that compilation is often confused with what he calls rework, or alteration of the original to create a derivative, and the data on open license distribution is quite interesting.

The open question in my mind raised by the license, which will be answered in part by the license’s reception, is: Are the majority of educators currently sharing content openly really interested in making their materials available for “frictionless” remix with no limitations? The license data would indicate no, but the argument against that data is that those choosing such restrictive licenses don’t understand the problems caused by restrictive licenses and if better educated, would choose less restrictive licenses. It will be interesting to watch the adoption of this license as an indicator.

Like many facets of open education, open access publishing is a great idea still searching for a business model. Yale’s recent announcement that it is dropping support for BioMed illustrates the point:

BioMedCentral has asked libraries for larger and larger contributions to subsidize their activities. Starting with 2005, BioMed Central article charges cost the libraries $4,658, comparable to a single biomedicine journal subscription. The cost of article charges for 2006 then jumped to $31,625. The article charges have continued to soar in 2007 with the libraries charged $29,635 through June 2007, with $34,965 in potential additional article charges in submission.

Open education endeavors have the double challenge of trying to create social benefit and develop business models in the rapidly changing web world, and clearly there are struggles ahead.

The Patry Copyright Blog and the Creative Commons blog are both covering a recent paper by UC Berkeley law professor Pamela Samuelson addressing the issue of copyright reform. As I’ve mentioned before, copyright reform would be an enormous help to open education–but don’t hold your breath. I’ve queued the paper up on my to-read list, and may come back to it here if it sparks any ideas, but the far more insightful commentary I’m sure is to be found on the above-mentioned sites.

People’s Open Access Education Initiative is an intriguing new project, one of a few I’ve seen emerging that I call “second generation” in that they don’t create OER from scratch, but instead build on the open resources already made available by others. In this case, the project intends to use a collaborative development model to localize public health content for developing regions. Here’s an excerpt from their About page:

The inspiration

The open source software movement provides an inspiration for an affordable and credible solution - Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS), ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSS . Many hundreds of individuals have contributed to the development of high quality software which is freely available on the Internet.

In the education field, there are now parallel developments of Open Educational Resources (OER), with an ever expanding range of high quality on line resources that are freely available through the Internet. (http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=Main_Page).

Our solution

Develop educational context around freely available open educational resources on the Internet – Peoples-uni.org. This is an open activity, to be developed in partnership across the global and digital divides. We are in development phase, and hope eventually to m ove towards the establishment of a ‘ Peoples Open Access University’.

Organisation

We do not plan to have a centralised organisational structure and are calling on various individuals and organisations to undertake various of the required tasks. We are calling this ‘Volunteersourcing’ – a variant of ‘Crowdsourcing’. While many of these tasks might be performed by volunteers, others will require funding (such as accreditation).

Computerworld is running an interview with MIT Professor Hal Abelson, who had a hand in launching both Creative Commons and MIT OpenCourseWare. Few have thought as long and hard about open licensing and open education as Professor Abelson. Here’s a taste:

The great power of the Web is that people can share stuff and remix it and build on each other’s work. But the way copyright law has evolved, it’s just not well matched to the Internet. Since 1986, in the U.S., if you create stuff, at that moment, it’s actually copyrighted. You don’t have to register it. What that means is, if you go out on the Web and see stuff, you have to assume you can’t use it. What should be a shared thing that people can use and contribute to ends up being an IP minefield.

As the debates about the incompatibility of open licenses rage on, it brings home to me again how they are really just a stop gap while the real battle is on carving out space for meaningful fair use and limiting copyright terms. The Wall Street Journal carries this account of how Google and others are pushing back against content producers’ attempts to limit fair use of their content. Here, the article discusses the infringement warnings at the beginning of books, movies and run during broadcasted sports events:

Many warnings “materially misrepresent U.S. copyright law, particularly the fundamental built-in First Amendment accommodations which serve to safeguard the public interest,” the complaint alleges. CCIA President Ed Black said the warnings create a “chilling effect,” dissuading consumers from using portions of the content in ways that are lawful.

The conflict illustrates the shifting concept of fair use in the digital age. “Fair use” of intellectual property revolves around the question of how much, if any, of movies, books, music and other creations can be used without permission of the owners. As Internet platforms have made it easier to redistribute chunks of content without asking for approval, copyright owners have become more protective about enforcing their rights.

With robust fair use, open education would rely less on open licenses. The good news here is that many of the most ferocious defenders of long copyright terms and narrow fair use are also business models that are dying painful deaths at the hands of other forces in the digital era, so I have hope that eventually companies with interest in less copyright protection (such as Google) will begin to hold sway over the old line media on these issues. (via Open Access News)

I recently came across this site which seeks to explore how viral marketing might benefit OER. I’ve spoken with Todd Richmond once or twice and he’s a compelling thinker, so this looks like an intriguing project to me. It points to a larger question, too, which is how does one make learners aware of open educational resources? Hewlett has invested large sums of money in open educational resources and they are I’m sure eager to insure the materials are widely recognized and widely used.

Hewlett has certainly made good first moves in drawing together a disseparate group of projects that share a commitment to openness in education under the OER brand, and that brand is being reinforced by portal sites such as OER Commons (another Hewlett project), but there are enormous challenges is getting users to understand 1) that there are high quality educational resources out there that can be accessed for free 2) what the different types of resources are in this broad and rapidly developing field, and 3) how each of the resources might best be used.

It’s an enormous marketing challenge, and not just for Hewlett. And like everything else in the field, the approaches are in early stages of development. I’m hoping this project continues to develop, as it looks like it might generate some interesting ideas.

One of the hopes for Web 2.0 in the open education space is that educational networking sites will emerge, but so far there’s no clear model emerging for how this might happen. The growth of social networking illustrates the complexities. c|net is reporting some of the recent data around the growth of social networks, and while there seems to be rapid growth all around, there is also a global patchwork of preferred sites, shown in this Valleywag illustration. There’s no clear consensus at this point if educational networking will emerge from these existing communities, through the creation of new parallel ones, or from somewhere else entirely. (via elearnspace)

Open Innovators has included WOE in the first edition of the Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing Carnival. A carnival, if you are not familiar, is a meta-blog where a carnival organizer assembles interesting blog posts and articles on a given topic, and then puts all those posts together in a blog post called a “carnival”. WOE is pleased to have been included, and the carnival promises to be a great opportunity to see how open innovation models operate across a range of fields beyond education.

David Wiley is announcing his new course, Introduction to Open Education, and–no surprise if you know David–it’s open. To anyone. He describes:

I’m also very happy to say that this class will be completely online, run completely in the open, and is welcome to all comers. If you would like to take the course for credit, just sign up for an independent study at your university and find a supervising faculty member to whom I can send a grade at the end of term. Be sure to contact me directly to let me know you’re taking the course for credit and send contact info for your supervising faculty member. Then add your info to the syllabus as directed (Name :: School :: Email :: Blog) so the rest of us can find you. If you don’t need credit but would still like to participate in the course, I’d also love to have you! Please just go ahead and add yourself to the syllabus.

For anyone looking to understand the open education field, even just a browse through the reading list is a great start. Participating in the class is a great way to really understand in a deeper way how the field has been developing.