We’re happy to have two interns this summer: Pei-Yi Wang (Google Policy Fellow) and Teresa Sempere Garcia (Community Support Intern).

Pei-Yi Wang / CC BY

Teresa Sempere Garcia
by Christian H. Paleari / CC BY

Pei-Yi has been with CC Taiwan via Academia Sinica part-time since 2006. As a graduate student at the Law School of National Taiwan University, she helped conduct research about open licenses, porting and translating the CC 3.0 licenses and the CC0 text, assisting governments, academic institutions, libraries and museums to apply CC licenses, and analyzing copyright and other legal issues. More recently, Pei-Yi received her LL.M. degrees from New York University School of Law and Georgetown University Law Center, with focuses on IP, corporate and international business. Before joining CC as a Google Policy Fellow, she practiced law in Taiwan National Digital Archive Project, a leading law firm, and served as in-house counsel in a multinational electronics contract manufacturing company in Taiwan. In her free time, she loves food tasting, music, and traveling.

Teresa is a free culture and free software activist who has been working in the field for many years. She was one of the creators and organizers of the highly successful Librebus Project in both 2011 and 2012, which took open advocates on a tour of Central and Southern America, running workshops and seminars. Teresa has earned degrees in Advertising and Public Relations (University of Alicante, Spain), Specialist in Design and Communication (Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain), Specialist in International Cooperation for Development (University of Alicante, Spain), and Cultural Management focusing on Culture, Communication and Politics (Catholic University of Cordoba, Argentina). She has worked in educational and cultural projects around the world, including in Belgium, Sweden, Italy, and Slovenia (working as Assistant Project Coordinator of Europe WAGGGS), in addition to Argentina and Costa Rica (working for AECID, the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and Development). Teresa enjoys traveling, photography, swimming, and cycling.

Teresa is based remotely in Cordoba, Argentina and will be working with Jessica Coates, the Affiliate Network Coordinator, as well as the Regional Coordinators, to facilitate collaborative projects among CC’s global volunteer network, particularly focused on the Global Summit and a new project for the production of CC toolkits. Pei-Yi will be based in Mountain View and will help with the development of the Open Policy Network.

Books /John Liu / CC BY

A report issued by the United States Government Accountability Office on June 6th confirms a trend of the educational publishing industry: textbook costs to students at higher education institutions are rising 6% per year on average, and have risen 82% over the last decade. The study, ordered by Congress, looks at the efforts of publishers and colleges to increase the availability of textbook price information and “unbundled” buying options as required under provisions in the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HEOA). The GAO also interviewed faculty regarding benefits of this transparency and offering of new options for students purchasing course materials.

What they found

Findings of the study indicated that faculty are more aware of textbook affordability issues than they used to be, though they see the appropriateness of materials as the most important factor when it comes to choosing resources to use in a course. HEOA requires publishers to include information about textbook prices when marketing to faculty, including wholesale prices and copyright dates of previous versions. While the report finds that publishers have passively made this information available through their websites and other materials, the GAO did not investigate whether publishers are actively providing the information to faculty as required by law. Making this information not only available, but highly visible, is the best way to support and equip faculty to consider textbook costs and potentially explore more affordable and flexible textbook options.

The study also finds that textbook price transparency helped students save money, particularly because of the information colleges and universities posted in course catalogs. Of the 150 institutions the GAO reviewed, 81 percent provided textbook information online during the months leading up to the fall 2012 semester. This allowed students the opportunity to consider the costs associated with each course and the time to seek cost-cutting alternatives like used books and renting. But even with this relief, textbook prices continue to reach into the $200-and-more range for high-enrollment courses. The end goal of the HEOA price transparency provisions is to pressure publishers into lowering their prices for good.

What this means

As Nicole Allen, Affordable Textbooks Advocate for the Student Public Interest Research Groups (Student PIRGs) explained, “Overall, the report shows that the HEOA requirements have helped students and professors become more aware of textbook costs, and this awareness builds market pressure that will eventually lead to fairer prices and more affordable alternatives. Although right now publishers stubbornly continue driving prices skyward, they can only ignore the call for affordability for so long.”

The report mentions other textbook affordability efforts that colleges and universities explored alongside providing textbook price information. About two-thirds of the schools that the GAO interviewed offered an institutional rental program, and many offered price information for alternate formats, such as e-textbooks. For example, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges’ Open Course Library, which offers Open Educational Resources (OER) and other low cost materials for the system’s 81 largest courses, has saved students $5.5 million to date — about three times as much as the program cost. As the shift of resources towards efforts that provide more options to students and faculty is seen across the US and in other areas around the world, we anticipate more participation in communities around OER. Which is a great thing.

Next steps towards affordable textbooks

The HEOA requirements for textbook price transparency were a good first step, but there’s more work to do to solve rising textbook costs and lack of flexibility in choosing learning materials for courses. OER, like those created, revised, and shared in the Open Course Library have the potential to significantly offset these costs while at the same time providing more options for faculty and students to customize textbooks and other courseware to their needs. CC believes that OER is the next step in providing affordable, flexible, and truly open educational opportunities for students and faculty, allowing global citizens to better choose their own learning pathways.

opensourceway / CC BY-SA

A joint statement issued by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on June 7th affirms the potential for OER as a solution: “As the GAO report suggests, transparency alone isn’t enough. Students need more access to high-quality, affordable options that challenge the current price structure set by a handful of publishers. Open Educational Resources, which include high-quality open textbooks that are free for faculty to adopt and students to use, offer a promising step forward. With many recent technology advancements it will be important for Congress to continue to learn more about the textbook sector to ensure that there are accountability mechanisms in place to protect students and taxpayers.”

The Student PIRGs announcement about the study is here
The full report of the GAO’s study can be found here
And lastly, a podcast with a member of GAO’s staff that led this study is here

Judy van der Velden / CC BY-NC-ND

CC is excited to announce the launch of our Affiliate Project Grants. These project grants will be used to support and expand the work of CC’s Global community of volunteers.

The goal of the grant program, which is enabled by sponsorship from Google, is to increase the capacity of CC Affiliates and community members working towards our mission, by providing support for local events and projects. Projects that might be covered by the grants include everything from OER workshops to film and music festivals to publications to research – anything, in fact, you can imagine that expands knowledge and adoption of open policies and practices around the world.

Proposals submitted by CC affiliates and community members will be selected to receive up to $20,000 USD towards their project(s). We are hoping to distribute these globally, with at least one project in each of the major geographical regions, and to cover projects small (eg writing and printing factsheets) and large (eg running a region wide series of workshops).

The application deadline is July 8. You can find out more about how to apply, eligibility, timeline, example projects, and the selection process here. Only those working with CC’s local community teams are eligible to apply – so if you have a good idea, find out how to contact your local CC team here.

We are looking forward to reviewing all the exciting project ideas that come from our affiliate community!

Last week the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) released a draft plan on how they’d support public access to federally funded research aligned with the February 22 White House public access directive. The SHared Access Research Ecosystem, or SHARE, is a plan that would draw upon existing university infrastructure in order to ensure public access to publicly funded research. SHARE works through a federated system of university repositories. Participating universities would adopt a common set of metadata fields for publicly funded research articles. The metadata will communicate specific information so the article may be easily discovered through common search engines. Minimum metadata will include author name, title, journal, abstract, and award number. The university-focused SHARE plan was announced in the same week as CHORUS, an effort championed by a coalition of commercial publishers.

In order to promote broad access and reuse of publicly funded research outputs, the SHARE proposal says that federal agencies need to be granted permissions that enable them to make the deposit system work. Therefore, universities and principal investigators need to retain sufficient rights to in turn grant those permissions (access, reuse, archiving) to the federal agencies. From the plan:

Copyright licenses to allow public access uses of publications resulting from federal awards need to be awarded on a non-exclusive basis to the funding agency responsible for deposit in order for that system of public deposit to work [...] Federal funding agencies need to receive sufficient copyright licenses to peer-reviewed scholarly publications (either final accepted manuscripts or preferably final published articles) resulting from their grants to enable them to carry out their roles in the national public access scheme. Such licenses would enable the placement of peer-reviewed content in publicly accessible repositories capable of preservation, discovery, sharing, and machine-based services such as text mining, once an embargo has expired.

The need for universities and researchers to maintain rights to make their research available under open licenses is aligned with the recommendations that Creative Commons made to the federal government in our testimony during the public hearings at the National Academies. In our comments, we urged agencies to allow authors to deposit articles immediately in a repository under a worldwide, royalty-free copyright license that allows the research to be used for any purpose as long as attribution is given to the authors. By making it possible for authors to make their research articles available immediately as open access, federal agencies will be clarifying reuse rights so the downstream users know the legal rights and responsibilities in using that research. This would include important reuse permissions noted in the SHARE proposal.

We also suggested that federal agencies require that authors deposit their manuscripts into a public repository immediately upon publication in a peer reviewed journal. This is also in line with the SHARE plan. If an embargo is present, the SHARE repository will link to the commercial publisher’s website. And once the embargo period expires, the repository would be able to “flip on” access to the article which would then made available under the open license.

The SHARE proposal also notes, “licensing arrangements should ensure that no single entity or group secures exclusive rights to publications resulting from federally funded research.” It is important that universities and scholarly authors properly manage copyrights from the get-go in order to make sure that the final manuscript is made publicly available under the requirements set out by the White House public access directive. This important consideration has been widely discussed at the federal level when the NIH Public Access Policy went into effect. In addition, universities have passed open access policies that reserve the legal rights to archive research conducted by their faculty. And author-level copyright tools have proved to be useful for faculty to preserve some rights to the articles to which they submit to commercial publishers.

Ryan / CC BY-SA

Lumen Learning, a company founded to help institutions adopt open educational resources (OER) more effectively, just launched its first set of course frameworks for educators to use as-is or to adapt to their own needs. The six course frameworks cover general education topics spanning English composition, reading, writing, algebra, and college success, and are openly licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY).

The course frameworks were developed by the Lumen Learning team in concert with faculty members at nine institutions who worked to align the content with defined learning objectives and quality standards. By providing openly licensed course frameworks developed and vetted by experts, Lumen Learning hopes to make it easier for educators and institutions to use OER. From the press release,

“Our ultimate goal is to provide sustainable open textbook alternatives for an entire general education curriculum and even entire OER-based degree programs,” said Kim Thanos, CEO and co-founder of Lumen Learning. “We are thrilled with the interest and momentum we are seeing around OER today. It is definitely a rising tide, benefitting students, instructors and institutions alike.”

You can browse the CC BY-licensed course frameworks at http://www.lumenlearning.com/courses. Lumen Learning will also offer additional course frameworks in business management, psychology, chemistry, biology, and geography in the coming months.