However, as we ramp up to include more participants this year I’ve started wondering about the URL structure of having multiple departments participate. What I would love to do is still assign one blog per course, but be able to organize these under “subdirectories” as follows:

http://open.byu.edu/ipt/692/
http://open.byu.edu/comd/411/
http://open.byu.edu/eime/515/

&c. You get the idea. I haven’t been able to spend a ton of brain power on it, but I can’t figure out how to get the /ipt/ or the /comd/ in the middle there. Any thoughts?

Also, I’m wondering what to do URL-wise about courses like IPT 692. This is an Advanced Issues seminar and is taught multiple times each year by different faculty. Multiple times each semester, in many cases. How should I proceed? /ipt/692/wiley/? And how should I archive these? /ipt/692/wiley/2009/fall/?

We average as many as 2,000 unique visitors to the site every day from all over the world. We have mirror sites up in Africa, China, and Indonesia (that we know of). Our site has been translated into several languages, and is the third most visited site on the usu.edu domain. Being the OCW director is something I’ve loved doing the last four years.

However, it is coming to a close.

Budget cuts have resulted in the program coming to an end. We’ve spent the last six months scrambling to find a way to keep the lights on. We’ve sought after state money, private money, grant money… We’ve found nothing, so as of June 29th, I will be starting a new job.

It’s heartbreaking to see the project come to an end. Hopefully, as Justin’s dissertation demonstrates that universities can provide a significant public good AND generate revenue at the same time through OCW, USU will reconsider its decision to shutter the program.

With help from many other supportive staff at COSL, Marion has admirably led this project to great heights in public service and has been responsible for bringing a significant amount of notoriety and public regard to Utah State University. Marion, thank you. God speed in your new efforts.

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.

Section 4(d) includes a list of types of research that are exempt from the public access requirement. Section 4(d)(3) includes this exemption:

research resulting in works that generate revenue or royalties for authors (such as books) or patentable discoveries, to the extent necessary to protect a copyright or patent;

It will be interesting to see how this exemption plays out as the bill moves forward… Unfortunately, this bill won’t be bringing us open textbooks, but I guess there will be other legislation for that.

[Malcolm's] first argument that makes no sense is, “should we want free to be the future?”

Who cares if we want it? It is.

The second argument that makes no sense is, “how will this new business model support the world as we know it today?”

Who cares if it does? It is. It’s happening. The world will change around it, because the world has no choice. I’m sorry if that’s inconvenient, but it’s true.

I must admit to agreeing with this analysis, and there is a message here for higher education. His later comments are even more relevant for those who work at universities that are trying their best to ignore the free / open revolution occurring around them:

Like all dying industries, the old perfect businesses will whine, criticize, demonize and most of all, lobby for relief. It won’t work. The big reason is simple:

In a world of free, everyone can play.

This is huge. When there are thousands of people writing about something, many will be willing to do it for free (like poets) and some of them might even be really good (like some poets). There is no poetry shortage.

Competition! Massive amounts of almost-no-barrier-to-entry competition. Much of it will be poor. I suppose you can take some comfort in that. But some of it will be very, very good. And that should scare existing institutions silly. The education game is about to change, and you (your institution) have three choices:

1. Innovate your way forward. If you allow your business model to become flexible and responsive, you can feel your way forward, influencing the emergent educational context as it simultaneously influences your business model. (A dynamic system!)

2. Wait for others to innovate their way forward. Let them shape the future educational context without your input, and hope that 10 years from now higher education is still a place where your institution is relevant. (If it isn’t, you’ll have only yourself to blame.)

3. Ignore / deny that anything is changing (or will ever change). Higher education is too important, too deeply woven into the fabric of society, too critical for employers, and too big a business to fail. (See you on the other side with GM and AIG.)

Chris’ book may or may not deal with higher education specifically, but higher education will have to deal with his thesis as surely as I’m typing this post. As Lehi taught, there are two types of things in this world – “things to act and things to be acted upon.” The day is close at hand when each university will have to decide which they are.

In the most unbelievable part of the history of openness in education (for me as a native West Virginian, anyway), West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd announced that his current term in office would be his last. (I think he was like 108 at this point.) His final piece of legislation would be a third Morrill Act that would support the land grant institutions in creating OCW-like projects to provide increased access to educational opportunity to the general public. The so-called “Byrd Bill” passed, creating a small pot of dedicated monies for public schools to draw on in order to support their OCW initiatives.

I suppose thinking that Byrd would introduce the bill was a bit too self-indulgent on my part, but today Inside Higher Ed is reporting on a U.S. Push for Free Online Courses. Byrd didn’t write the language himself, but it does appear to come during Byrd’s last term in office (unfortunately for WV):

Community colleges and high schools would receive federal funds to create free, online courses in a program that is in the final stages of being drafted by the Obama administration. The funds envisioned for open courses — $50 million a year — may be small in comparison to the other ideas being discussed. But in proposing that the federal government pay for (and own) courses that would be free for all… the draft language suggests that the administration is throwing its weight behind the movement to put more courses online — and offer them free.

If my predictions continue to be (largely) correct, we next wait to hear a deafening silence from the online curriculum and textbook publishing industries…

In a blog post titled The Future of Newspapers, Posner opines that the best solution to the newspaper industry’s problem may be expanding the scope of copyright law:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

Now, I’m certainly not one of the country’s most respected legal scholars, but here’s some advice for the newspapers: IF YOU DON’T WANT PEOPLE LINKING TO YOUR CONTENT, DON’T POST IT ON THE WEB. That’ll be $2500 / hour for legal consulting, please.

On the other hand, there may be something useful hidden in this recommendation. Imagine momentarily that the Web had turned into a place where you could only link to pages whose rights holders had given you explicit consent to do so. The best mechanism for giving this kind of consent is, of course, the Creative Commons licenses. This proposal could go a long way toward eliminating links to fully copyrighted content, effectively eliminating it from the network (consider – if a writer posts a story in a forest but literally no one links to it, does it exist? Google and Yahoo can only crawl pages that someone links to) and leaving only a huge interconnected graph of CC-licensed material.

Not to mention the fact that all material is copyrighted, meaning that you wouldn’t be allowed to link to anything without the owner’s previous permission. And if you couldn’t link to it to look at it, how would you know whether you wanted to link to it?

If anything, this blog post shows that Posner understands nothing about the Internet. How embarrassing for him! Perhaps I needed to ask for his permission before linking to and commenting on his post?

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.