Archive for the ‘Sustainability’ Category

The New York Times announced Tuesday that they were doing away with the TimesSelect paid content program.  In the Times estimation the potential for growth in advertising was greater than the potential for growth in subscribers.  At the kind of traffic levels the Times enjoys (13 million unique visitors each month), this may be true, but it’s not yet clear that advertising can support lower-traffic models.  Still it’s an idication that putting content behind walls is losing steam.

As summer winds down, I find myself thinking about the program I participated in this time last summer, the Global Social Benefit Incubator at Santa Clara University. This program focuses on social entrepreneurship, which is essentially the development of sound business models intended to generate social benefit as opposed to (or in addition to) financial gain. I was fortunate to participate in the program along with about 20 other representatives of incredibly inspiring programs from around the world. The program was very influential in my thinking about sustainability for open education projects. My only regret is that their courseware is not openly available, as there are a great many more who could benefit from access to the materials.

I’ve just finished Charles Vest’s The American Research University from World War II to World Wide Web. Vest was president of MIT when OpenCourseWare was proposed, and has been one of the strongest proponents of the project and the concept. The American Research University (published under full copyright by the U of C Press) is based on speeches given by Vest as the 2005 Clark Kerr Lecturer on the Role of Higher Education in Society.

Vest was president of MIT for thirteen years, an extraordinarily long tenure during which he witnessed extraordinary changes in how universities do business, and this book is filled with observations that can help emerging leaders of open education projects understand the pressures faced by senior leadership at universities. The book contains four chapters covering the relationship between universities and government, universities and philanthropies, universities and terrorism, and finally universities and openness. While the last is the most directly on the topic of openness (it recounts the development of MIT OCW), the others are probably as relevant, especially given that nearly all open education projects have sustainability issues, and because opening knowledge is both more challenging and important in a post 9/11 world. Very much worth the read.

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)

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)

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.

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.

I was talking today with some colleagues about what makes for an effective newsletter, and it reminded me of the Berkman Center’s Filter, one of the few e-mail newsletters I actually look forward to getting. The Filter comes with great information about projects going on at the Berkman Center, and upcoming conferences related to cyberissues.

The June edition includes a discussion of the business model for Christopher Lydon’s RadioOpenSource, which attempts to streamline public broadcasting funding models via a web-based approach. I’m keeping a close eye on public broadcasting business models as they develop for the web, because this is the closest analogy I can think of to open publication of educational resources.

The majority of OpenCourseWare projects out there are republishing materials created for classroom use. There are a few OCWs that are creating course materials specifically for open use online, and UC Irvine is a good example. They announced the launch today of courseware to support teacher certification in California. These sets of courseware are interesting from a number of angles–they have a different set of cost challanges, and they are generally directed at a particular audience, rather than being made openly available to an unspecified audience for unspecified uses. It will be interesting to follow how sustainable these efforts are as compared to resuse models, and how attractive they are to their intended audiences.