Tag Archive for 'legislation'

Durbin Open Textbook Bill Finally Introduced!

Published on September 30, 2009 in open content and open-education. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Earlier this year I blogged about what I thought should go into an open textbook bill (with clarifications the next day). I’m extremely pleased that Senator Durbin has introduced a bill which closely resembles these recommendations and therefore, to my mind, is on exactly the right track. You can read Durbin’s remarks as he introduced the bill, and then study the full text of S. 1714 on GovTrack (where you can also subscribe to a feed of all bill-related activity).

The bill creates a competitive grant program supporting the creation of open textbooks, and most importantly requires applicants to submit:

(C) a plan for distribution and adoption of the open textbook to ensure the widest possible adoption of the open textbook in postsecondary courses, including, where applicable, a marketing plan or a plan to partner with for-profit or nonprofit organizations to assist in marketing and distribution; and

(D) a plan for tracking and reporting formal adoptions of the open textbook within postsecondary institutions, including an estimate of the number of students impacted by the adoptions.

This is terrifically exciting to me, as it will bring a real sense of urgency of impact into the discourse, and provide the OER community with good data and metrics to talk with confidence about the amount of money students are saving thanks to open textbooks.

The most interesting part of the bill is Section 5. on LICENSING MATERIALS WITH A FEDERAL CONNECTION:

In General- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, educational materials such as curricula and textbooks created through grants distributed by Federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, for use in elementary, secondary, or postsecondary courses shall be licensed under an open license.

This language provides nothing short of an NIH-style mandate on all publicly funded curriculum, and does not appear to be limited to the textbooks whose creation is funded by the bill. This is huge! It’s like FRPAA for educational materials!

Those of us who consulted on the drafts during the spring / summer were waiting to see how Durbin would choose to deal with the licensing issue, and the bill takes a middle road, requiring textbooks funded under the program to also use an “open license,” which the bill defines as “an irrevocable intellectual property license that grants the public the right to access, customize, and distribute a copyrighted material.” No specific license (or family of licenses) is mentioned or required.

This is a great day for the open education movement! If you have a representative on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, contact them to make sure they support this legislation!

Cornyn’s Remarks Introducing S. 1373

Published on July 2, 2009 in open content. Closed Tags: , , .

GovTrack has the full text of the remarks made by senators as they introduce legislation. Here are Sen. Cornyn’s remarks as he introduced S. 1373, the Federal Research Public Access Act:

Sen. John Cornyn [R-TX]: [Introducing S. 1373] Mr. President, I rise to introduce the Federal Research Public Access Act. I am very pleased to be joined again by my good friend and colleague, Senator JOE LIEBERMAN, who has remained dedicated to seeing this important legislation passed. This bipartisan bill is the same legislation we introduced in the 109th Congress. The purpose of this legislation is to ensure American taxpayers’ dollars are spent wisely, which is even more important now in this time of fiscal tension.

To put things in perspective, the Federal Government spends upwards of $55 billion on investments for basic and applied research every year. There are approximately 11 departments/agencies that are the recipients of these investments, including: the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, NASA, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Agriculture. These departments/agencies then distribute the taxpayers’ money to fund research which is typically conducted by outside researchers working for universities, health care systems, and other groups.

While this research is undoubtedly necessary and is beneficial to America, it remains the case that not all Americans are capable of experiencing these benefits firsthand. Usually the results of the researchers are published in academic journals. Despite the fact that the research was paid for by Americans’ tax dollars, most citizens are unable to attain timely access to the wealth of information that the research provides.

Some Federal agencies, most notably the NIH, have recognized this lack of availability and have proceeded to take positive steps in the right direction by requiring that those articles based on government-funded research be easily accessible to the public in a timely manner. I am proud to report that the NIH’s public access policy has been a success over the past few years. By the NIH implementing a groundbreaking public access policy, there has been strong progress in making the NIH’s federally funded research available to the public, and has helped to energize this debate.

Although this has surely been an encouraging and important step forward, Senator LIEBERMAN and I believe there is more that can and must be done, as this is just a small part of the research funded by the Federal Government.

With that in mind, Senator LIEBERMAN and I find it necessary to reintroduce the Federal Research Public Access Act that will build on and refine the work done by the NIH and require that the Federal Government’s leading underwriters of research adopt meaningful public access policies. Our legislation provides a simple and practical solution to giving the public access to the research it funds.

Our bill will ask all Federal departments and agencies that invest $100 million or more annually in research to develop a public access policy. Our goal is to have the results of all government-funded research to be disseminated and made available to the largest possible audience. By speeding access to this research, we can help promote the advancement of science, accelerate the pace of new discoveries and innovations, and improve the lives and welfare of people at home and abroad.

Each policy that these departments and agencies develop will require that articles resulting from federal funding must be presented in some publicly accessible archive within six months of publication. In doing so, the American taxpayers will have guaranteed access to the latest research, ensuring that they do not have to pay for the same research twice–first to conduct it and then again to view the results.

This simple legislation will provide our government with an opportunity to better leverage our investment in research and in turn ensure a greater return on that investment. All Americans stand to benefit from this bill, including patients diagnosed with a disease who will have the ability to use the Internet to read the latest articles in their entirety concerning their prognosis, students who will be able to find full abundant research as they further their education, or researchers who will have their findings more broadly evaluated which will lead to further discovery and innovation.

While a comprehensive competitiveness agenda is still a work-in-progress, this legislation is good step forward. Providing public access to cutting-edge scientific information is one way we can encourage public interest in these fields and help accelerate the pace of discovery and innovation. In promoting this legislation, I hope to guarantee that students, researchers, and every American can access the published results of the research they funded.

OA, All the Way

Published on June 26, 2009 in open content. Closed Tags: , , , .

Open Education News and Open Access News are running stories about a new OA mandate from the Institute of Education Sciences:

Recipients of awards are expected to publish or otherwise make publicly available the results of the work supported through this program. Institute-funded investigators should submit final, peer-reviewed manuscripts resulting from research supported in whole or in part by the Institute to the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) upon acceptance for publication. An author’s final manuscript is defined as the final version accepted for journal publication, and includes all graphics and supplemental materials that are associated with the article. The Institute will make the manuscript available to the public through ERIC no later than 12 months after the official date of publication. Institutions and investigators are responsible for ensuring that any publishing or copyright agreements concerning submitted articles fully comply with this requirement.

Perhaps even more exciting is news today about the reintroduction of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) today by U.S. Sens. John Cornyn, R-TX and Joe Lieberman, I-CT (it was originally introduced in 2006). The legislation would “require every federal department and agency with an annual extramural research budget of $100 million or more to make their research available to the public within six months of publication.” Sen. Cornyn’s press release has more details.

This would mean that in addition to the existing NIH and IES mandates, we would have mandates in place for all research funded by NSF, DofEd, DofEnergy, and almost every other federal agency. Things are moving along! First, NIH, then IES, and now FRPAA has been reintroduced… It’s almost as if we’re slowly iterating toward openness.

OER Legislation in Utah?

Published on May 15, 2009 in open content. Closed Tags: , .

This year’s MASTER STUDY RESOLUTION for the 2009 General Session, a “joint resolution of the [Utah] Legislature [which] gives the Legislative Management Committee items of study it may assign to the appropriate interim committee” over the summer, includes something we have been hoping to see! Item 30 reads:

30. Educational Resources in the Public Domain – to study how curriculum materials and other learning resources created with state funds may be placed in the public domain.

If the public pays for it the public deserves free access to it, right? Looks like we’re one step closer to a more formal conversation about OER here in Utah!

Open Textbook Legislation Responses, Part 2

Published on May 7, 2009 in open content. Closed Tags: , , .

Stephen says, “My argument is that if you require a letter of suipport from publishers, then publishers will immediately turn this into a cartel, which would mean that prices would not drop at all. You do not address this line of reasoning at all.”

I’ll happily address it here, but Stephen’s comment also ignores my main point.

First, let me deal with the suggestion that price will not drop at all. A content-complete openly licensed version of the book online is all the price control that is needed. The existence of this version controls price by providing an alternate mechanism for accessing the content. If you really want a printed version, and you can purchase one for $25, you’ll purchase one. If you really want a printed version, but you can only buy one for $75, you’ll just print out all the pages at Kinko’s and put them in a three-ring binder. More than one person will create and distribute (legally) a PDF that makes printing for your three ring binder really easy, and no one will purchase the $75 version from the publisher. The same is true for an audio version, etc. So the existence of the free version provides price control all by itself. If the publisher wants to sell books, those books have to satisfy Wiley’s magic formula of open book sales:

(Purchase price) must be lower than (price to print your own + the hassle of preparing to print your own)

I’ve edited or written chapters for a number of books that were available in commercial print editions as well as in an openly licensed, content-complete online format. As a concrete example, print copies of my learning objects book sold like hotcakes because the price to purchase a printed copy satisfied the magic formula. If the publisher had priced the book higher, it simply wouldn’t have sold.

Now, I must ask Stephen to comment on my main point with regard to the necessity of publisher participation in open textbooks. I would estimate that – speaking of existing open textbooks that do not have the marketing support of a commercial publisher – there are more open textbooks in the world today than there are classes in which open textbooks have been adopted. Simply funding the creation of more textbooks will not lead to an increase in classroom adoptions; rather, it would perpetuate the current unsatisfactory state of affairs. So I would ask a question and pose a challenge.

Question: In the case of open textbooks, is there a more important metric for success than course adoptions?

Challenge: Propose a more effective method for achieving adoptions than involving organizations with adoption-specific expertise and providing them a market incentive.

Stephen asks, “You mean [you can work around these problems using legislative and RFP language] the way it has been in other legislation and RFP processes? Seriously, there is enough room for scepticism here to drive a truck through.”

Yes, I think you can – if you only release the grant money in portions as people meet milestones. Especially if you only fund authors in the first phase, and publishers don’t receive any funds until they meet their first milestone, which is posting a content-complete version of the textbook with all source files on a public server under an open license. There are probably other ways to accomplish this, but yes, I think we can.

Finally, Stephen says (and I’m snipping for space) “There is a whole line of my reasoning that you simply don’t get… it’s a perceptual issue, not an issue of reason or rationale… Go to a grocery store in the inner city and then go directly to the same brand grocery store in the suburbs. The inner city store is not only smaller and dirtier, it has fewer choices and they are more expensive. The suburban store is larger, nicer, and cheaper… If you haven’t _seen_ this, you can work yourself into a state of denial that this sort of structure can exist in an economy. Much less understand that it is absolutely _fundamental_ to the economy… Markets are based on *denying* *access*. It is easier to deny access to poor people, because they have no rights. If you are not even willing to SEE this, then you cannot engage in a discussion of how it is happening in the current case.”

I agree completely that this happens. I grew up in one of the poorest parts of the US, lived in the most rural parts of Japan, etc. Who can deny that this problem exists? Even worse than grocery stores is access to lines of credit. “Poor” people pay interest rates many times over again what “wealthy” people pay, for these same reasons you outline above.

My response to your comment was a question, which went unanswered – how are open textbooks supposed to deal with this very real problem that we agree exists? Should we ~not~ distribute the online versions for free, because only wealthy people can get online (supposedly)? Should we ~not~ distribute printed copies, because we will have to charge for them? Should we scrap the idea of open textbooks and the university courses that require them altogether? There must be an implied action behind your criticism. What are you suggesting we DO?

There have been a variety of creative proposals for solving the “access to credit for poor people” problem, like microlending. Rather than criticizing open textbooks because of larger systemic inequities, can we invent the “microlending” solution of the textbook world? And most importantly, does the kind of progress on open textbooks I’m suggesting need to wait for this other solution to be discovered? In other words, is it all or nothing?