Universities, the Internet, and the , the Internet, and the Information CommonsInformation Commons

Hal Abelson hal@mit.eduMIT Dept. of Electrical Eng. and Computer. Sci.

MIT Council on Educational Technology

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• 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 VestPresident’s Report, Fall 2001

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Site Highlights

Syllabus

Course Calendar

Lecture Notes

Assignments

Exams

Problem/Solution Sets

Labs and Projects

Hypertextbooks

Simulations

Tools and Tutorials

Video Lectures

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Legal details

• 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

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OCW Site TrafficMIT OCW Monthly Traffic (since 10/1/03)

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13.9 M137.2 M

17.8 M

61.7 M

7.8 M

50.4 M

2.6 M

19.6 M

4.3 M

RegionHits Since 10/1/03

Hit %

North America 137,154,920 43.5East Asia 61,706,485 19.6Western Europe 50,372,337 16.0South Asia 19,558,358 6.2Latin America 17,826,440 5.7Eastern Europe and Central Asia

13,942,007 4.4

MENA 7,748,165 2.5Pacific 4,249,296 1.3Sub-Sahar. Africa

2,551,284 0.8

TOTAL HITS 315,109,292

Traffic by Geographic Region (in Web hits, since 10/1/03)

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Educators

Self-learners

Students

Oth

ers

13%

4%

52%

31%

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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 SolutionsPartner

October 18, 2004

MarCom Creative

Awards (2)

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OCW Translations

• 60 courses in Spanish and Portuguesethrough Universia.net partnership

• Individual courses in 10 languages• Extensive translation efforts beginning in

China and Taiwan

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Other universities are starting their own

OpenCourseWare projects

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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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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

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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

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More than 100 Dspace

instances

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MITOPENCOURSEWAREMASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Two coordinated initiatives to strengthen the information commons

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Why should universities build repositories like DSpace and OpenCourseWare?

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Why should universities build repositories like DSpace and OpenCourseWare?• Without initiatives like these, traditional

academic values will be increasingly marginalized, and university communities will be increasingly stressed.

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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

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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 2001 http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/lectures.htm>

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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 2001 http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/lectures.htm

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Corynne McSherry

Who Owns Academic Work?

Harvard University Press, 2001

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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)

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Why should universities build repositories like DSpace and OpenCourseWare? (2)

• 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.

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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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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.

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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 - 2004

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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 - 2004

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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 - 2004

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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

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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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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.

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One publisher’s view

Private monopoly control of the scientific record.

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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

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selection

production

authoritative source

dissemination

indexingdata mining

review

new access tools

creation

preservation

quality assurance

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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

indexingdata mining

review

new access tools

creation

preservation

quality assurance

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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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<rdf:RDF xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/"

xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"

xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">

<Work rdf:about="">

<dc:type rdf:resource="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" />

<license rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/" />

</Work>

<License rdf:about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/">

<permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Reproduction" />

<permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Distribution" />

<requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Notice" />

<requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Attribution" />

<prohibits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/CommercialUse" />

<permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/DerivativeWorks" />

<requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/ShareAlike" />

</License>

</rdf:RDF>

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Answer three simple questions to choose a license.

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Then, you’ll get a logo to put on your web page.

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The logo links to the Commons Deed.

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The Commons Deed links to the Legal Code.

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• As of August 2005– About 53,000,000

web pages link to a CC license, according to Yahoo

Copyright Public Domain

Creative Commons

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Metadata-aware search engine:

the Web

Search for works you can share and re-use

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Mozilla Search Box

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QuickTime™ and aTIFF (LZW) decompressorare needed to see this picture.

Find me IMAGES of SUNSETS that I can MODIFY:

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QuickTime™ and aTIFF (LZW) decompressorare needed to see this picture.

Find me IMAGES of SUNSETS that I can modify:

Photo By: Marco Cortesi

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QuickTime™ and aTIFF (LZW) decompressorare needed to see this picture.

Reads the code out of the web page:

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Over 4.7 million CC-licensed

photos on Flickr (Sept. 2005)

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Mixter

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Internet Archive

Free Hosting for CC works

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ccPublisher.

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Choose a license.

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Upload your file.

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Get a download URL.

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Your work is online at the Internet Archive.

91Wired Magazine, Nov. 2004

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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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END