, the Internet, and the Information Commons Universities, the Internet, and the Information Commons Hal Abelson MIT Dept. of Electrical. Eng. and Computer. Sci. MIT Council on Educational Technology

2 Question: How is the Internet going to be used in education, and what is your university going to do about it? An answer from the MIT Faculty is this: Use it to provide free access to the primary materials for virtually all our courses. We are going to make our educational material available to students, faculty, and other learners, anywhere in the world, at any time, for free. MIT President Charles Vest President’s Report, Fall 2001

3 The concept, as announced April 2001 –MIT will put all its course content, undergraduate and graduate, into Web-based format –The OCW Website will be open and freely available to the world –MIT will commit to OCW as a permanent, sustainable activity –Plan: 50-course pilot for Sept. 02. Commitment to have 500 courses published by Sept. 03.

4 Site Highlights  Syllabus  Course Calendar  Lecture Notes  Assignments  Exams  Problem/Solution Sets  Labs and Projects  Hypertextbooks  Simulations  Tools and Tutorials  Video Lectures

5 Legal fine print Participation by faculty is voluntary Faculty retain copyright, but grant MIT an irrevocable nonexclusive license to include their material in OCW MIT publishes OCW under a Creative Commons license –Attribution –Noncommercial –Share-alike

6 OCW Site Traffic MIT OCW Monthly Traffic (since 10/1/03)

M M 17.8 M 61.7 M 7.8 M 50.4 M 2.6 M 19.6 M 4.3 M Region Hits Since 10/1/03 Hit % North America137,154, East Asia61,706, Western Europe50,372, South Asia19,558, Latin America17,826, Eastern Europe and Central Asia 13,942, MENA7,748, Pacific4,249, Sub-Sahar. Africa 2,551, TOTAL HITS315,109,292 Traffic by Geographic Region (in Web hits, since 10/1/03)

8 Countries with most hits in October 2004 (outside of U.S.) Country Web Hits 11Japan559,389 12Turkey480,554 13Spain440,210 14Pakistan413,360 15Singapore411,290 16Australia383,359 17Czech Republic364,671 18Netherlands313,102 19Mexico301,440 20Vietnam279,080 CountryWeb Hits 1China2,127,727 2India1,919,088 3Taiwan1,760,944 4Canada1,337,334 5 United Kingdom 1,026,644 6South Korea954,124 7Germany717,634 8France665,014 9Brazil587,039 10Italy576,179

Traffic from 3200 universities, colleges (since 10/1/03) UniversityVisits 1 Natl. Univ. of Singapore 11,245 2 National Taiwan Univ. 10,816 3Harvard University5,915 4Stanford University3,334 5Georgia Tech Univ.3,175 6Purdue University3,154 7 Columbia University 3,046 8 University of Michigan 2,976 9 Univ. of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana 2, National Chiao Tung Univ. (Taiwan) 2,812 UniversityVisits 11Cambridge University2, Texas A&M University 2,747 13Cornell University2, Univ. of California at Berkeley 2, University of Southern California 2,498 16Univ. of Washington2,407 17Boston University2,406 18University of Texas2,369 19Univ. of Pennsylvania2, Carnegie Mellon Univ. 2,278

User profiles › 55% of educators teach at 4-year colleges or the equivalent › 49% of educators have less than five years teaching experience Educators Self-learners Students Others 13% 4% 52% 31%

11 OCW Use data 5.7% response rate on 21,500 surveys Use Scenario% of Use Planning, developing or teaching a course36% Enhancing personal knowledge22% Planning curriculum10% Other32% Complementing a subject currently taking43% Enhancing personal knowledge40% Planning future course of study10% Other7% Enhancing personal knowledge81% Learning subject matter—course not available for study 9% Planning future course of study8% Other2% Educators Students Self- learners

12 OCW Recognition April 20, 2004 The Webby Awards January 29, 2003 Kyoto (Japan) Digital Archive Project October 15, 2003 Microsoft Internet Biz Solution of Year October 21, 2003 Mass. Interactive Media Council (2) November 10, 2003 InfoWorld 100 Award June 7, 2004 ComputerWorld Honors Program September 29, 2004 Digital Education Achievement Award C E R T I F I E D ……………………… Business Solutions Partner October 18, 2004 MarCom Creative Awards (2)

13 OCW Translations 60 courses in Spanish and Portuguese through Universia.net partnership Individual courses in 10 languages Extensive translation efforts beginning in China and Taiwan

14 Other OCWs are beginning to appear Some using MIT materials, some using the format, some using the idea

15 OpenCourseware: Alignment with MIT Core Values Commoditizing the “content” sharpens our focus on the substantive values of residential education: personal attention from faculty and participation in learning and research communities “Giving it away” helps defuse complex intellectual property issues of ownership and control that can distract the university from its mission to disseminate knowledge

16 DSpace Vision –A federated repository that makes available the collective intellectual resources of the world's leading research institutions Mission –Create a scalable digital repository that preserves and communicates the intellectual output of MIT's faculty and researchers –Support adoption by and federation with other institutions Implemented by MIT Libraries staff working together with Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and the World Wide Web Consortium

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24 Range of DSpace content at MIT Preprints, articles Technical reports Working papers Conference papers Theses Datasets –Statistical, geospatial, biological, etc. Images –Visual, scientific, etc. Audio and video recordings of lectures, and other multimedia objects Learning objects Reformatted digital library collections DSpace will be the archive for OpenCourseWare

25 DSpace Technology Open-source implementation, freely available A digital library standard and architecture including: –Metadata based on Web Consortium’s RDF –Access control –Collection management tools –Federation architecture

26 DSpace Federation Initial partners with MIT are Cambridge, Columbia, Cornell, Ohio State, and Universities of Rochester, Toronto, and Washington Will help drive DSpace development –Content to test interoperability –Digital preservation expertise Federation plan and governance structure being developed with funding from the Mellon Foundation Beyond the Federation, about 140 known DSpace adopters, over 10,000 downloads of DSpace software

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35 MITOPENCOURSEWARE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Two coordinated initiatives to strengthen the information commons

36 Companion visions OpenCourseWare vision: Global access to the raw material from which the world’s great learning institutions create educational experiences for their students DSpace vision: Global access to the collective intellectual resources of the world’s leading research institutions through a federation of institutional archives

37 Why should universities build repositories like DSpace and OpenCourseWare? To help pursue our mission as institutions of higher education and scholarly research.

38 From MIT’s Mission Statement The mission of MIT is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. The Institute is committed to generating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge, and to working with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world's great challenges.

39 Fundamental Questions about the Role of the Institution OpenCourseWare: What should be the university’s institutional role in disseminating and preserving our educational contributions? DSpace: What should be the university’s institutional role in preserving and disseminating our educational and our research contributions?

40 Why should universities build repositories like DSpace and OpenCourseWare? (2) To help pursue our mission as institutions of higher education and scholarly research.

41 Why should universities build repositories like DSpace and OpenCourseWare? (2) To help pursue our mission as institutions of higher education and scholarly research. Without initiatives like these, traditional academic values will be increasingly marginalized, and university communities will be increasingly stressed.

42 University of Southern California As an academic institution, USC's purpose is to promote and foster the creation of intellectual property. It is antithetical to this purpose for USC to play any part, even inadvertently, in the violation of the intellectual property rights of others. September 2002, letter to USC students from the Dean of Libraries

43 University of Chicago The creation and dissemination of knowledge is a collective enterprise at a university.... Even when faculty members teach a class that they have prepared at home with their own materials, the work is itself supported by the salary the faculty members enjoy and all the other support—intellectual, financial, logistical, and otherwise—that the University provides.... For this reason, we recommend that the University formally implement the principle that the University owns the intellectual property the faculty create at the University or with substantial aid of its facilities or its financial support. Approved by the Council of the University Senate on April 27, 1999.

44 Many students probably create a work that would infringe a faculty member's copyright, that is, they base their notes on and incorporate her particular expression rather than just state facts and ideas she articulates in more detail. Faculty members have always permitted this kind of activity without actually talking about it. They “implicitly” license students to create a “derivative work” from the lecture. The license is implied through academic tradition -- students are expected to take notes. … Now faculty may wish to make the implied license explicit and add some restrictions. A limited license to take notes could be very important to protecting the intellectual content of lecture materials … University of Texas, Office of the General Counsel, August >

45 The suggested license … Written and verbal instructions at the beginning of class could look something like this: My lectures are protected by state common law and federal copyright law. They are my own original expression and I record them at the same time that I deliver them in order to secure protection. Whereas you are authorized to take notes in class thereby creating a derivative work from my lecture, the authorization extends only to making one set of notes for your own personal use and no other use. You are not authorized to record my lectures, to provide your notes to anyone else or to make any commercial use of them without express prior permission from me. University of Texas, Office of the General Counsel, August

46 Conflating “freedom of inquiry” with “freedom of property” Intellectual property law … embodies the notion that the only forms of cultural work that can be “protected” are those that can be owned. … … the conflation of property rights and “academic rights” participates in a set of discourses … in which freedom can only be understood to mean “individual free enterprise.” In retelling this tale academics risk losing a language for talking about knowledge as other than private property and the university as other than economically “useful.” Corynne McSherry, Who Owns Academic Work? (2001)

47 Why should universities build repositories like DSpace and OpenCourseWare? (3) To help pursue our mission as institutions of higher education and scholarly research. Without initiatives like these, traditional academic values will be increasingly marginalized, and university communities will be increasingly stressed.

48 Why should universities build repositories like DSpace and OpenCourseWare? (3) To help pursue our mission as institutions of higher education and scholarly research. Without initiatives like these, traditional academic values will be increasingly marginalized, and university communities will be increasingly stressed. To keep a seat at the table in decisions about the disposition of knowledge in the information age.

49 Challenges to universities from the “propertization” of scientific publication Cost Imposition of arbitrary, inconsistent rules Impediments to new tools that could aid scholarly research Danger of monopoly ownership and control of the scientific literature

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51 If people were asked to sign a petition to do away with paying tax, many would sign. But they then might be the first to complain about deteriorating infrastructure and lower standards of public service. The publication of research is a serious business yet only costs a fraction of the funding of that research. Robert Campbell, President Blackwell Science, Ltd.

52 Scientific literature as property: The basic deal Scientist authors give their property away to the journal publishers. Publishers own this property and all rights to it forever, and they magnanimously allow the scientist author to retain some limited rights that are determined at the publisher’s sole discretion. The university generally gets no specific rights. And the public doesn’t enter into this deal at all.

53 Some rights generously granted to authors by the Association for Computing Machinery the right to reuse any portion of the work, without fee, in future works of the author's own, including books, lectures and presentations the right to revise the work the right to post author-prepared versions of the work … in a personal collection on their own Home Page and on a publicly accessible server of their employer. Such posting is limited to noncommercial access and personal use by others … ACM COPYRIGHT POLICY, Version 4 Revised 11/01/02

54 Some rights generously granted to authors by Elsevier the right to include the article in full or in part in a thesis or dissertation (provided that this is not to be published commercially) the right to present the article at a meeting or conference and to distribute copies of such paper or article to the delegates attending the meeting; the right to prepare other derivative works, to extend the article into book-length form, … the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final article … on the author's personal or institutional web site or server authors.elsevier.com

55 Some rights generously granted to authors by the Journal of the American Chemical Society Authors may distribute or transmit their own paper to not more than 50 colleagues Authors may post the title, abstract (no other text), tables, and figures from their own papers on their own Web sites paragon.acs.org

56 and from the New England Journal of Medicine… The Massachusetts Medical Society is the owner of all copyright to any work published by the Society. … The Society and its licensees have the right to use, reproduce, transmit, derive works from, publish, and distribute the contribution, in the Journal or otherwise, in any form or medium. Authors will not use or authorize the use of the contribution without the Society’s written consent, except as may be allowed by U.S. fair-use law. authors.nejm.org/Misc/MsSubInstr.asp

57 We make this deal because … Maintaining the integrity of the publication process is vital, be it in print or online. … It is not a process that should be ceded to unknown individuals … Copyright should not be ceded to individual authors who would not be able to undertake the job of protecting their work from the introduction of errors. Ira Mellman, Editor, Journal of Cell Biology

58 What’s valuable for promoting the progress of science? Quality publications and a publication process with integrity, certainly. But also … Open, extensible indexes into publications Automatic extraction of relevant selections from publications Automatic compilation of publication fragments Static and dynamic links among publications, publication fragments, and primary data Data mining across multiple publications Automatic linking of publications to visualization tools Integration into the semantic web And hundreds of things no one has thought of yet

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62 Will sophisticated research tools Be stillborn by limited access to quality sources? Or Stimulate network effects that lead to further concentration and monopolization of the scientific literature?

63 One publisher’s view We aim to give scientists desktop access to all the information they need, for a reasonable price, and to ensure that the value of the content and the context in which it is presented are reflected in the information provision. The information is made available to researchers under licenses accorded to their institutes, and they have all the access they wish. We are talking about private monopoly control of the scientific record.

64 promoting the progress of science and the useful arts Will universities have a seat at the bargaining table? Institutional players jockeying for influence and control For-profit publishers Professional societies Non-profit publishers … selection production authoritative source dissemination indexing data mining review new access tools creation preservation quality assurance

65 promoting the progress of science and the useful arts Will creators have a seat at the bargaining table? Institutional players jockeying for influence and control For-profit publishers Professional societies Non-profit publishers … selection production authoritative source dissemination indexing data mining review new access tools creation preservation quality assurance

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68 Copyright law makes it difficult to build on each other’s work all rights reserved © might not be the right choice for all of the people all of the time. This is the default. public domain: no rights reserved might be the right choice for some of the people some of the time. This is surprisingly hard to do. controlled sharing: some rights reserved might be the right choice for more of the people more of the time. This requires lawyers to write and interpret licenses.

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77 Copyright licenses for people who understand that innovation and new ideas come from building off exisiting ones.

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80 Summary Universities have core institutional reasons to support the information commons Universities can establish institutional mechanisms that support the information commons. Everyone can support the commons by using Creative Commons licenses

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82 Universities, as institutions, pre-date the “information economy” by many centuries and are not for-profit cultural entities, whose reason for existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization, not just download data into student skulls, and the values of the academic community are strongly at odds with those of all would-be information empires… Universities do not merely “leak information” but vigorously broadcast free thought. Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown (1992)

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