Open Access textbooks, provincial ministers of education and Access Copyright

(First published on IT World Canada blog)

There is an interesting article by Gale Holland in the Los Angeles Times talking about the “eye-popping costs” of college and university textbooks. Caltech economics professor R. Preston McAfee offers a solution, which is to create textbooks that can be freely distributed given the bulk of these costs come from copyright costs and the costs of largely unnecessary intermediaries. McAfee “finds it annoying that students and faculty haven’t looked harder for alternatives to the exorbitant prices”.

Textbooks are most often authored by people who are staff at educational institutions. This staff then sells (or often gives away) their work to educational publishers who then edit and re-sell the material back to the educational sector. These educational publishers then further demand high photocopying and other fees through organizations like Access Copyright. Many people have observed that educational publishers represent the bulk of the fees flowing through Access Copyright.

There is an alternative, which is to make the textbook material freely available at the source (the educational author), use print-on-demand (or electronic reading), and skip the educational publishers entirely. This is already being done with MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), which is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world, with translations to languages other than English.

Opening material like MIT has allows for collaboration across institutions. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world. These institutions are able to make use of the benefits of Commons Based Peer Production, a term first introduced by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler in his paper “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm“. The benefits of this model are further explained in Benkler’s book “The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom”. These materials help explain how institutions like MIT benefit not only other institutions by making materials Open Access, but how they receive massive benefits themselves through resource multiplication.

When Mark Leggott, a University Librarian at the University of Prince Edward Island, blogged about the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) encouraging academics to retain copyright, he suggested that this could “build a strong foundation for open access”. My hope is that that is the case, but this presumes that it is the educational institutions — and not the educators — that have been a larger barrier to the adoption of open access.

We may find that educators are a larger barrier. CAUT is also a member of Access Copyright, and may be thinking more as royalty-demanding authors than as educators helping reduce high costs to students.

I have to admit that I am not certain what the barrier has been to moving away from the outdated use of educational publishers and adopting open access methods. I am only guessing from watching related debates that it is the educational institutions and the provincial education miniseries that are the largest problem.

The discussion around so-called “educational use of the Internet” is an example. While some organizations like CAUT have suggested that educators should simply rely on a broad interpretation of fair dealings, other organizations such as the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC) and the Canadian Teachers’ Federation (CTF) have been asking for an educational exception, and Access Copyright has been asking for a levy. As I interpret this, CMEC and Access Copyright are in agreement that legacy methods of production should continue to dominate, and they are only arguing about price.

It is frustrating to watch CMEC focus on trying to get exceptions to copyright, often claiming that they can’t afford the costs in their budgets. At the same time, educational institutions are increasingly encouraged to charge royalties for the outputs of these institutions in the form of copyright and patent royalties. This is hypocritical, and should not be accepted by politicians.

The best long-term solution is to adopt Open Access for as much material as possible. The reduction of royalty fees that would need to be paid by the educational sector would be party redirected to pay for the production and editing of the open access material, as well as pay appropriate fees to materials (such as fictional works, etc) where Open Access and peer production techniques do not work well.

This is a decision that is in the hands of a few groups:

a) Educators, and their unions (CAUT, Canadian Teachers’ Federation, etc), need to embrace the new model by accepting one-time fixed fees for works created by educators, and no longer demand royalties. In a number of cases collective agreements may need to be enhanced to facilitate this. Open Access does not suggest that the authors of material do not get paid, but that they get paid one-time fees rather than royalties.

b) Educational institutions need to adopt policies to facilitate this production method. In the case of MIT they have policies where faculty retain ownership of most materials prepared for MIT OpenCourseWare, following the MIT policy on textbook authorship. The institution then directly funds the OpenCourseWare initiative (hosting, technical support, etc).

c) To encourage the longer-term cost savings, educational ministries may need to condition some funding on the adoption of Open Access. There are a wide variety of options being explored in other situations such as Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (policy encourages rather than requires open access), the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) , and others. (Glen Newton’s blog is a great source for Canadian open access information)

In a technology law column back in January, Michael Geist asks why there is so little happening in Canada. “The sole Canadian participant in the Open Courseware consortium is Capilano College, a relatively small school with 6,700 students located in North Vancouver, B.C.”

He mentions the issue of collective agreements with educators standing in the way of mandating participation, but that there are many educators that are willing. I believe the problem rests with the administration who hypocritically want to have it both ways (free inputs, royalty-bearing outputs), and provincial ministries of education who haven’t done their homework to adequately understand the large long-term benefits of this type of investment.

I suspect that the institutions, school boards and ministries are also heavily lobbied by special interest groups like Access Copyright and the educational publishers they primarily represent, who do not want to be cut out of the loop. Modern production mechanisms have made their participation in the educational sector unnecessary for the most costly educational material, and we should not be allowing them to stand in the way of modernization. There will still be fiction and other material where Open Access and Peer Production methods don’t work well, but with the educational publishers out of the way it will be much easier to direct appropriate funds to the appropriate authors.