11/20 Class Notes

From CyberOne Wiki

PARTICIPANTS / INTROS (Richard):

Laura DeBonis

• Google booksearch – making all the world’s books searchable
  • 100 million books worldwide
  • 20% public domain
    • entire book searchable and readable online, can be downloaded as a pdf.
  • 5% in copyright and in print
    • under contract with publishers
    • show a % of the book
  • 75% © unclear or in © but out of print
    • show “snippets”
    • searches the whole book but only shows 3 snippets per search (not the whole text)

Sid Verba

• Social scientist and librarian at Harvard
  • Harvard’s library is the largest non-governmental library in the world (1.5 x the size of any other private library)
    • open to Harvard community
    • open to scholars from the world, but only if they get to Cambridge
  • Harvard working together with Google on the project
    • so far just providing books in public domain
    • would like to provide books under ©, too.
  • [Find this book in your library] button on Google book search
    • actually directs you OUT of Google and to local libraries. A great resource.
  • Open Collections program
    • digitizing manuscripts, letters, books, and other rare documents
      • “Women Working” collection 3,800 book (80-90,000 pages) of backup material for students and teachers about Women’s work in the US before 1920
      • “Immigration project” collection – same idea about immigration (includes manuscripts written by Harvard Faculty about anti-immigration)
      • contagion and Infectious diseases information/literature - info about the effects and development of disease historically
  • 4 Purposes:
    • political equality – giving access/voice to people by spreading access to intellectual resources
    • make books searchable – greatly increasing access and findability of resources on any given topic
    • break down the internet/library barrier
    • preserve digital copies of deteriorating books
    • Seeking to open up the access to Harvard Library to everybody

Anne Marguilles (MIT OpenCourseWare)

• MIT OpenCourseWare
  • History:
    • 2001 – announced
      • counter-intuitive at the time, since the height of the .com era
      • idea from MIT faculty committee about influence of internet on education (originally thought they were going to end up with a distance learning plan)
      • decided to give away the educational materials of MIT as a way to advance MIT’s mission of advancing education
    • Now – 1550 of 1800 courses available on the MIT site
  • Description
    • Voluntary – over 80% of faculty participate
    • 1.2 million visits/month
    • 50% of them are self learners (not just educators)
    • 30% are students
    • 15% are educators
    • 40% in the U.S.
    • very popular – lots of testimonials from people all over about the influence on their lives
• democratizing knowledge
  • hoping that other universities would follow, allowing them all to cooperate and create a large body of knowledge
    • What about other universities?
    • around 100 universities around the world are developing their own OpenCourseWare sites - mostly international universities (China, Japan, Europe)
    • a handful of US schools
      • Tufts, Johns Hopkins (School of Public Health), Notre Dame, Utah State (water resources), University of Michigan, Michigan State, Yale University
  • Now working on, an OpenCourseWare consortium portal to bring them all together

Stuart Shieber

• chairing a committee on scholarly communication (not open access, per se)
• mechanisms in which researchers and scholars communicate today
  • How do scholars communicate now?
    • articles written, reviewed, edited by each other and published in journals, subscribed to by research libraries
    • high subscription costs for journals, tens of thousands of dollars/journal
    • contributors aren’t compensated by journals
    • NOT how you would design it now.
    • why have the middleman journals?
  • Open Access publishing:
    • the same system as above for writing, editing, reviewing but then
    • articles made available for free without cost over the internet
  • How to move from the current system to an Open Access world where the scholarly materials are freely available?
    • Possible ideas:
      • educate the faculty and exhort them to take advantage of and found open access journals
      • self archiving – have faculty unilaterally make their article available online (requires the publishing faculty member to retain rights)
      • what if publishers push back and refuse?
        • usually, though, authors retain those rights.
      • automatic license – individual authors don’t need to make sure they retain their rights, instead have them be automatically granted and vested in an institution (the university) giving the university a non-exclusive distribution right

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NOTES / DISCUSSION (Sai)

How open should our university be to the net? Four participants to engage with us in empathic argument

Stewart Schreiber - chairman of the provost’s committee on open access, professor in computational linquistics

Anne Margulies - executive director of MIT’s open courseware

Laura Debonis - Google, Googlebooks Sid Herman - University Librarian, prof, specialization

Intent of book search Sid - why the Harvard Library has spent much time and resources getting involved with Google. Purpose is to open these collections to those outside of Harvard, with the ability to network between libraries, so that you can find copies of books in the Harvard collection in local libraries Other project - putting together collections on specific topics, so that professors and students in other universities taking courses can have backup materials and otherwise unavailable manuscripts 3rd project - literature on the effect of infectious diseases as they take their toll 4 purposes - plays a major role in spreading equality (spreading out higher education), can find obscure information through search, Google Video at 1:42 - 1:45

anne - open courseware - Nesson’s question - why haven’t other universities followed through? MIT’s Open Courseware - announced in 2001, counterintuitive that MIT was announcing it was giving away all of the educational materials used in the curriculum, came from a faculty committee meeting about the internet & education. Thought best way to advance education around the world was to give it away rather than start a commercial endeavour. 1550/1800 courses published. Overwhelmingly positive response - 1.2 million users a month, unbelievable number of self-learners, 30% are students, 15% are educators, 40% in the states, 30% growth per year, organic University response - wanted universities to build a collective body to offer education over the internet, now 100 universities who are developing their own open courseware sites. Most of them are international (top in China, Japan, many in Europe) started open courseware consortium In us - tufts, johns Hopkins (school of public health as an example), notre dame, Utah state, Michigan, Michigan state, and yale are working on theirs

Stewart - interested in the mechanisms scholars communicate with each other. Now its through articles reviewed by faculty members and published in journals, subscribed to by research libraries, and then used by other scholars. Journals are expensive, upwards of tens of thousands per year per journal Done for the distribution of knowledge, not money Remove middle-man from the loop, you get open access publishing In an open access journal, same system up to the access point - made available free without a subscription cost over the internet - argument that you’d want to set up something more like this than current system if able to set up a system now. How do we move from here to there? What can Harvard do? Educate faculty, get them to get involved - start open access journals, stop helping out egregiously closed access journals; self-archiving - requires you retain certain rights to do this so as not to be in violation of copyright that would normally go to the journal, problems - need to have every individual act have rights, publishers may not want to give out copyrights (although lots of journals already allow this, but might push back); entertaining have an automatic license to give the university ability to provide articles

Questions from the opposition Question - skeptical about efficacy of the whole system, about the print archival library project - to make it useful to the end user there has to be a way of organizing the material, not efficient enough and a waste of resources Sid’s response - two sides of the story - 1) romantic side -browsing a library shelf has its own organization, but this doesn’t work because there are too many volumes, and many volumes are in remote storage, libraries are all over the place (different buildings). Value of the google project allows you to find these books that you’d never know existed - brings books in storage out to the open again. Question is how do you take a huge amount of info, and find new ways to search through this immense amount of information? What might happen - more and more systematized, search for strings, etc.

Nesson’s looking for more of a principled objection - an objection to the advertisement google made.

Less incentive for publishers to publish books if google’s making the money off of books

What incentive do we have to continue paying for education that others could get for free? Subsidizing others’ education. People stop coming to school if they can get it for free, system breaks down, or people really do come here for the diploma. Taken a step further, we’ve also earned the space here, culmination of years of work to come here, and now anyone, who may not have been diligent or productive, now have access - not fair.

Someone speaking after liking open access, but embittered after facing the world - all of these projects involve idealistic group of people who want to share the knowledge, and there are others who have money - how are we going to convince those who have money - charley (painting a comic book world, how can good persuade evil), but there are opposite views, how do they resolve this issue?

Someone who believes in the freedom of information, worried about single private company having control over vast amounts of information - company’s out to make money, and he has serious misgivings about treating them like a public charity

Professor or librarian - worried about the reduction in quality of research, oldey time ways you read a lot of stuff that didn’t matter directly, but learned a lot, search doesn’t coincide well with this better form of research

Stewart’s response - found that open access=good, not=evil, is reasonable. Counter to openness of scholarly argument - the scholarly community takes raw knowledge and refines it, public at large may not be ready for it until scholarly community has filtered out incorrect information, come up with better conclusions over time, with openness, a scholar puts something out, and then you have authority for an outrageous claim. Becka - when people go out of academia, find that certain resources are now locked (lexis nexis is paid) - when academics is open to the private sector but not vice versa, academics would be at a disadvantage

Anne - countering hard earned degrees would be undervalued (reduce the value of the degree) - some students upset, alumni very hurt at first - it became apparent though, that the materials are just the raw materials, you don’t get the interaction with students and professors with open courseware - you become part of the vast research - a self-learner can’t do the same as a student at mit But then a different tune - mit open courseware is now used by 85% of the mit student body-had a positive impact, alums can stay connected and up-to-date, explore courses they couldn’t take while on campus

Laura - response to question about research - didn’t originally realize they were getting tangled in this, librarians had this worry for a while, feel that librarians are complementary to book search, not replaced by it. Always going to be a role for those who understand research and can teach research. Becka’s response - stopped speaking to librarians, laura’s response - maybe because you’re information savvy, going forward, librarians will still be used to teach how to use book search and similar things at an expert level

Sid - response to google’s private enterprise. Google’s wonderful and talented, but common argument - shouldn’t this be done by the government or consortium of public entities, but government isn’t and won’t. Many nonprofits came together to try to do it, but didn’t have money or it wasn’t high enough priority. So google is the only player in town - they have been responsive - allowed free public printing, networking with libraries (which would lose them out on advertising revenue) - google’s not making money at his expensive - they were concerned with their business, but the library’s perspective is to perform scholarship and people in general. Nesson’s question - how are they making money? Sid’s response - their business to see how they’re making money, want people to go to google, library’s made sure that there are no ads on requests from Harvard’s websites. Trying to keep their side pure, but probably not completely pure. Harvard gets a copy of the digitized files which they couldn’t afford. Stewart also pointed out that Harvard is free to go to others as well. Becka - is google free to make this a subscription service? Sid - but then we are free to make it freely available if we want to. Nesson - to laura, speak to us from the for profit side - what are you getting for your money from Harvard? Laura - getting access to a set of resources that will keep people coming back to google. Contracts with library’s aren’t exclusive, they get a copy back - can share a portion with other entities - its about getting info out there, not about exclusivity - public domain stuff for example would be out there no matter what google does, but everyone’s handling copyright carefully

Sid - responding to value of degree, do you object to the need based aid? Response - why not lowering tuition to account for giving away these raw materials away to others for free? Sid - response to another question - you’re giving away these books for free to those who shouldn’t read them? Librarians feel that we should spread knowledge to everyone, makes society better Another argument - Harvard has a monopoly over certain types of literature (ex. Slavic) - if the dean says that a professor wants to study Russian novels, he should come to Harvard, but he hasn’t heard this argument from any faculty members - why? They are studying this because they want people to read these things, they think its important that people read them. Response from elitist - Harvard library paid for by Harvard students and alumni, public libraries paid by taxes, nesson - why is that a distinction? Student - worked hard to distinguish himself from other lawyers, etc. - you can say that the real reason to go to Harvard is to interact with students and professors, but he can see this as the beginning of the slippery slope when the value of the degree/education will decrease. Christina - not a fair comparison to compare law degree to stack of books in the library, online component is not as rich as live component