A few days ago, I wrote about the problems with breaking coherent web platforms down to delivering only a specialized kind of content. The kind of attitude that knowledge shall be brought to you by Blackboard, while your marketing website is okay to run on Drupal or WordPress. When technologies are siloed, we not only isolate the teams who end up only managing a specific platform for its specific function (teaching and learning, marketing or research…), but we also exclude many potential audiences from finding out or learning more about the topic.

How little do we know! Here is a question for you: is thischangedmypractice.com (TCMP) a research, marketing, teaching and learning website or professional development tool? I would argue it is all of the above! It is written by medical practitioners, discusses various health issues in an open environment, and contributes to the general public’s knowledge and understanding of those issues. Four out of six UBC values are covered here: Advancing and Sharing Knowledge, Public Interest (open blog, written in popular format); Excellence, Integrity, (done by medical experts): check, check, check, check!

It all looks good, but there is a catch: it is very uncertain whether there would be such a buy-in from busy doctors if there were nothing in return. No free lunch, as usual: upon publishing in TCMP, contributors to the site get study credits from the College of Family Physicians of Canada – the body that regulates licenses of medical doctors in Canada.
In my mind, this creates a great symbiosis of sustainable approach to promoting and sharing knowledge with the doctors’ need to keep their professional license! This model (along with many possible variations) is something that should come naturally to the university; the multipurpose, integrated approach should be the standard and not the notable exception to common practices of creating sites that are designed to deliver to one audience only.

It is a great marketing website as well – it has thousands of subscribers, it created quite a buzz in the medical community, it shows up high in Google searches. By driving a lot of traffic to UBC, it promotes the University’s work, excellence, impact and value to the community… and attracts potential students!

The best possible marketing for the university is the work of its people – so let’s make more of that visible. By doing so, we are also helping faculty, staff, and students promote their work and build portfolios and future careers. We are contributing to the public domain and sharing knowledge that would otherwise stay locked behind the secure doors of a closed LMS and then erased at the term’s end.

So, the university’s key engagements – teaching, learning, research, creation, and also, its practical need for marketing and promotion – should all happily cohabitate to deliver on the university’s key values – to connect to the community, make an impact on the local and global scale, etc.

And this is where we go back to our generalist story – generalists are not paralysed by too narrow of job description; with their many different skills are able to draw subtle connections between marketing and research, learning and networking. They can design balanced interfaces, and continually deepen and enrich the interactions around knowledge that is created, nurtured and shared in open, and provide a fantastic opportunity for the university to (besides saving tons of money on waste) promote itself in a more meaningful and community-oriented way, reinvent itself and at least try to find its niche in the new rich online landscape that seems to be reshaping fast and getting ahead of us at an accelerated rate.

In many larger organizations, there is often a push to put things in a certain “order” that administration (non-educators and non-developers) is comfortable with. In the case of higher-ed, especially with its large, cubicle-seated, vertically organized groups, there is a strong trend to divide technology into The student learning management system (LMS) that covers “all” students’ teaching and learning needs, and into The content management system (CMS) that, managed by marketing people, is meant for “administrative” websites. And, of course, research is under a separate VP and thus needs to have its own systems and staff. And so on, for all the lovely silos. The more broken down, the merrier; this system creates more bureaucracy, more reporting and analysis. It is disconnected both from within itself and from its users, so it requires more staff to keep it going, more managers and more analysts.

This approach is a very typical and also very wrong one, as the expertise and resources needed to run and support, let’s say CMS (seen as “administrative” or “marketing” tool, though some of the best research or teaching and learning websites are built using UBC  CMS), are identical to those of an open publishing framework for teaching and learning (such as blog or wiki platforms) and shouldn’t be separated – one general, flexible and robust platform is capable of responding to most web needs. To further complicate things, in the administration’s desire to do things “properly” (like mid-’70s-IT properly) we are introducing too many flavours of unnecessary overhead or waste (Lean terminology), known as learning or web strategists (my title actually, though I wear few other hats), project managers, business analysts, faculty liaisons and many other fancy names.

We work (teach, design, code…) in the environment of rapid and constant change (perpetual beta) and by building so many layers between the faculty member who wants to experiment and embrace change, and the developer who wants to give, hack and create change, we are actually killing the experiment and killing the change itself.  We kill creativity and innovation, while we are supposed to support it. By stripping down web developers to the role of only coding whatever project manager or business analyst requires (and because managers and analysts are not creators and producers, they are not in business of inventing, hacking, dreaming and designing), we kill the much needed seeds of agility and entrepreneurship and we leave very little room for linchpins in us, with hard and practical skills.

That’s the shame, because the best of Web2.0 is telling us that we need to simplify things, not over-plan or over-analyse. Hear the idea, build, measure, learn. That’s why instead of many unnecessary roles, we need developers to be more of the generalists (Scott, thanks for this find) – for typical web company that’s the person that does information architecture, UX, coding front-end, back-end, db, scaling, bit of design; at the university, it is all of that plus bit of pedagogy and learning design. Not a biggy, few months of the right exposure for a reasonably intelligent individual.

“The best way to complain is to make things” shared CC by Mark Jensen

I feel fortunate to the point of absurdity to be in a job I enjoy so much, but still feel uncomfortable with the title “Director of Innovation”. I deflect some of the manifest weirdness by recasting my role as one of a “Re-Director”. But in truth, I feel almost as uneasy with “innovation”, a word deployed in so many bizarre and frequently unpalatable ways.

And when I reflect on our little corner of education technology over the past decade or so, I keep being reminded of an old zinger: “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without knowing civilization.” Seems like when it comes to the truly transformative uses of open and collaborative technologies, higher education went from ignorant dismissal straight to jumping onto what Mike Caulfield describes as “churnware hyped as innovation” without really giving the best stuff a fair shake.

But in all honesty, I feel almost as optimistic today for the potential to make a positive difference as I did in the euphoric days first encountering blogs, wikis, RSS and open culture. A lot of the good vibes coalesced while I was catching up on the media in and around Minding the Future / Open VA this week. I’ll try to capture some of what I find so encouraging in a few snippets and links (which will not come close to capturing all the ferment), and hope that something like clarity will follow. Synthesis is unlikely to visit me today.

Audrey Watters offers a succinct and inspiring mission I can get behind:

Resistance. Community. Open networks. Open content. Sharing. A place — on- or offline — that isn’t dictated by market forces. Local expertise. Local support. Leveraging technology to connect local learners and local expertise to the rest of the world. Care about students. Human connections. Wonder. Intellectual serendipity. But mostly resistance. A stronger and louder vision of what a more just and progressive and accessible future of higher education and technology should look like. It’s actually pretty easy to forecast the nightmare scenario of a higher education apocalypse. It’s easy to see signs of it in the headlines. The greater challenge, I’d argue, is to have a bolder and louder vision of higher ed’s future.

In response, Mike Caulfield expresses something that really resonated with me. “I feel it in my own work, which has shifted in the past three years from arguing against a status quo to arguing for an alternate vision of the future. I like the shift.” Being a naturally pessimistic fellow, I struggle with this shift. But there is no question that I feel healthier and more useful when I am arguing for (and working toward) an alternative future, even knowing evil will prevail. (Er… may prevail.)  And there certainly is something fun to argue for, and much work to be done.

Where do I want to direct my efforts? Like a few other people, I had flashes when reading this passage from Jon Udell (shame he couldn’t make it to Open VA in person). Among other things, he reinforces my faith in seemingly “retro” ideas like open online collaboration and publishing, and open standards:

There’s a reason I keep finding novel uses for these trailing-edge technologies. I see them not as closed products and services, but rather as toolkits that invite their users to adapt and extend them. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel calls such things “user innovation toolkits” — products or services that, while being used for their intended purposes, also enable their users to express unanticipated intents and find ways to realize them.

Thanks to the philosophical foundations of the Internet — open standards, collaborative design, layered architecture — its technologies typically qualify as user innovation toolkits. That wasn’t true, though, for the Internet era’s first wave of educational technologies. That’s why my friends in that field led a rebellion against learning management systems and sought out their own innovation toolkits: BlueHost, del.icio.us, MediaWiki, WordPress.

My hunch is that those instincts will serve them well in the MOOC era. Educational technologists who thrive will do so by adroitly blending local culture with the global platforms. They’ll package their own offerings for reuse, they’ll find ways to compose hybrid services powered by a diverse mix of human and digital resources, and they’ll route around damage that blocks these outcomes.

It will come as no surprise to Bava Freaks that these words resonated with Jim Groom. And although he draws an astute connection between this ethos and the ongoing ever-mutating wonder that is ds106 in that post, his merry band of ed tech adventurers are more explicitly building “innovation toolkits” in their Domain of One’s Own and Reclaim Hosting. (And just as I was about to hit the [Publish] button, I see Jim has posted this talk delivered while inexplicably hiding from a blazing Carribean sun.) There are a number of budding projects here at TRU that have benefited directly and immensely from Reclaim Hosting, and I look forward to sharing some of this Kamloops flavour as it comes to a boil. I offer gratitude and admiration to everyone involved, especially Tim Owens, who I increasingly suspect of possessing supernatural powers.

I could go on about the ongoing inspiration I draw from others in the Open VA universe: Giulia, Tom, David, Gardner, Martha, Kin and Scottlo among them… But in the interests of brevity and  serving my own selfish interests I’ll reserve my final shout-out for the venerable CogDog, who not only shared an abundantly human vision at Open VA, but offers up a proposal for building innovation toolkits for higher education — essentially a new focus for the work he has been doing so well for years.

I propose to build a suite of tool kits as extensions of the ones I have used or built for the ds106 open digital storytelling class but making them extensible for other subjects and organizations who would like to operate in a more “web-like” manner, using a distributed model where participants may create, publish in many places, ideally some are ones they manage.

By all means read the whole thing. I can testify that when Alan Levine says he is open to the contributions of others, he means it.

Not least of what energizes me about Alan’s work is his willingness to work with us at TRU as a testbed for his ideas and his code.

This post only begins to cover all the stuff that has me feeling the opposite of Abject these days, but maybe it begins to capture why we may be close to reclaiming innovation. Maybe I’ll need a new blog name soon.

Vista de la Biblioteca Vasconcelos shared CC by Eneas De Troya

Tucked down into an op-ed bemoaning the decline of Canadian think tanks:

First, think tanks can start thinking more like new media companies. At a minimum, they need to get on top of the possibilities afforded by social media, new communication tools, and dynamic forms of outreach. The ascendance of digital media is generating a dynamic ecosystem of media content, one where think tanks can add a valuable voice. This isn’t just a new means of content distribution, it actually changes the methods and nature of research itself. At OpenCanada.org, the CIC’s digital magazine, we have merged our media and research efforts, and use a dynamic publishing platform to injecting canadian research and mulltimedia content into global debates. The era of static websites and policy briefings is fading. Instead, Canada’s think tanks need to immerse themselves in the digital conversation. But to be effective, they need to make this a priority and build-in the requisite skills.

 
Brings to mind a few thoughts…

If I was editing this piece, I might have glanced at a thesaurus before passing “dynamic” for the third time in a paragraph. In fairness, it is a nice word, and most of the common synonyms don’t really work here.

My wordsnob snark aside, opencanada.org looks quite well done. Built using the open source platform WordPress, an immersion “into the digital conversation” is well within the grasp of any organization with basic IT capacity. And as I (and others) have argued before, building out our ability to do this sort of work ourselves strikes me as an effective and sustainability-minded use of resources.

The parallels between the challenges facing think tanks and universities are fairly self-evident. And yeah, using digital media intelligently, aligning the tools that we use for research with how we share the research not only makes sense but is something of an imperative today. But please, let’s see if we can do that without “thinking more like new media companies”. Rather than merely think in terms of how the web as it is changes what we do, let’s also think about how we can change the web.

This is something of a thin post, I know. It had its start as an intended email to TRU’s AVP of Research, with whom I have been having a fruitful ongoing dialogue about the relationships between open education and knowledge mobilization. But email is where information goes to die. And I was getting a little worried that if I didn’t post something on this blog soon that maybe my privileges would be revoked.

new car wash shared CC by vandy meares

One could argue that Audrey Watters’ dismissal of today’s announcement is a little harsh, somewhat cynical. Maybe insistence on open code and open content as necessary conditions for “open education” is a case of ‘zeal over pragmatism’.

But if proprietary content and platforms in service of for-profit enterprises counts as “open education”, just what is the “open” part supposed to be? Audrey’s subsequent tweets offer a clue.

Open as in doors. Open as in hearts. Open as in “for business”. And give them credit, the venture capitalized open education movers have proven tireless in making deals and spewing triumphant press releases. The Open Education Alliance represents the latest landmark in this glorious history.

In any event, while a concept such as open source carries certain obligatory qualities, when we talk about education the application of “open” is more closely related to how ‘All Natural!’ or ‘New and Improved!’ are used on our supermarket shelves. It’s gotten to the point where I find myself hesitant to use a term like “open education” when I speak with people. And I wonder if I still want to be called an open educator.

Reading stuff like this is a massive open online bummer. But truthfully, I’m actually not so Abject these days. I’m plenty busy working with people here and elsewhere on approaches to using online technologies to extend, enhance and energize learning. We share a dedication to working in ways that exploit network effects to inform, amplify and augment our practice. We share what we do because it feels good, because it makes what we do better, because it represents a human-scale way of being, one with global reach.

I’ll strive to adjust my bloggage accordingly.

For week four of the Why Open? course, we are looking at potential benefits of openness, as well as potential problems with it. There are many, many interesting stories and case studies listed on that part of the course, and I’m still working through looking at them (I’m interested in them all!).

For this post, I decided to add in another story that has recently come to my attention, and that hits home for me as an academic.

Rosie Redfield, Professor in the department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia, recently blogged about an issue that a colleague had experienced with an open access publication: after publishing in an open access journal (PLOS One), which puts a CC-BY (Creative Commons Attribution) license on published articles, she discovered that her research paper had been included in a collection of papers published by Apple Academic Press, for which the publisher was charging over $100 Canadian.

CC-BY logo, downloaded from the Creative Commons downloads page

Now, this may not seem so bad, because, after all, the CC-BY license allows this. It allows others to do anything they want with one’s work, so long as one is cited as the original author. So it would seem not to be the case that the publisher is doing anything wrong (that’s what I thought at first), and what’s really at issue here is authors not knowing that this sort of thing could happen. Thus it would seem that education about what CC-BY allows is all that is really needed (that’s also what I thought at first).

And even if the publisher is charging a lot of money for a book with open access articles in it, those articles still remain open access to be viewed by anyone, so no harm done, right?

Wrong. As I started reading more of Redfield’s posts on this issue, and when I read the results of a survey she did of researchers, I started to see some of the complications of the situation. Then when I met with her in person last week, I came to realize the nuances of what is happening and the potential problems that can result, both for researchers and for the public.

What’s the problem?

This is not simply a matter of authors being upset that someone else is making money off of their work (though as the survey results show, some do have that concern)–there are other problems as well. These are not listed in any particular order, but rather the order in which they’re coming to mind for me.

1. One might argue, as some of the authors in the survey did, that a publisher is making a profit off an open access work becomes more of a concern when authors have to pay a fee to publish in many open access journals (or to publish an article as open access in non-open access journals). Here’s a pretty thorough list of scholarly journal publishers and their “article processing charges” (APC’s). I was once asked if I wanted to pay over $2000 to have a 2-3 page book review published as open access in an otherwise closed journal. I decided the book review just wasn’t that good. 

The point is, it’s not just that some people are upset that others are making money off their work, but rather that they had to pay to publish their work open access, and they did this because they wanted the work available for others to view for free. Well, of course, it isn’t always individuals paying these APC’s–people can use grants to do so, and/or they can get funding to do so from their institution, just to name a couple of other sources of the money.

A rebuttal could be: well, the articles are still available to view for free, on the journal’s website, and likely other places around the web as well. This brings up the next problem.

2. Just because the articles are available for free elsewhere doesn’t mean the people who see the book in which they’ve been republished, and which is selling for a good chunk of money, are able to find that out easily. The problem with this particular book that Redfield talks about in her blog is that there was no indication at all that these were open access articles, and that they are available for free on the web. Of course not–that would mean no one would buy the book. Several authors in Redfield’s survey mention that they think such books should have to list the original source of the publication.

So people looking for scientific research may see the book and think they need to buy it to get access to the research. I find this quite troubling, as for me, the point of open access publishing is to allow people access to research without having to pay. That people are ending up getting duped into paying is a problem, in my view.

And it’s not just individuals, libraries may be buying such books (and using public funds to do so), as suggested in a comment on one of Redfield’s blog posts on this issue (the comment also mentions some other important downsides as well). When I met with her, Redfield told me she had spoken to a librarian at the University of British Columbia libraries, who said that they had about 50 of Apple Academic Press’s titles. Redfield was in the process of getting these titles to find out whether any of them are republications of open access articles.

Redfield notes in a blog post that actually, according to the terms of PLOS One, anyone who redistributes an article for that journal must also “make clear the license terms under which the work was published.”  The same is true for the license terms of BioMed Central. Upon looking into the legal code of the CC-BY 3.0 unported license, it seems to me that this sort of thing is required by the CC-BY license itself. It says, in section 4(a), here, that “You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for, this License with every copy of the Work You Distribute or Publicly Perform.” I had forgotten this, but of course I include a link to the CC license for any CC-licensed image I use on this blog, for example, precisely for that reason.

The PLOS One license terms also say that the redistribution of articles from PLOS journals must include citation not only of the author, but also of the original source. So do the Wiley Online Open terms (which allow you to publish an open-access article in an otherwise non-open access journal). And Taylor and Francis and Routledge Open too. I’m not going to do an exhaustive search of all open journals, or journals that allow open-access content, to see what their terms are. The point is that such terms do exist, and at least in the case where the article from PLOS One was republished without citing the original source and license, such terms were violated.

Copy Cat, by Robert Couse-Baker, licensed CC-BY

3. The articles in the book Redfield talks about were edited to some degree from how they appeared in the original publications (I’m not sure how much, exactly). Of course, the CC-BY license allows others to “adapt” the work, so this is not a problem in itself. The problem comes in when one thinks about what might be possible, such as book editors making fairly significant changes to an article that, even by accident, end up making the argument weaker or suggest claims that the author would not have made him/herself.

Then, what comes into the picture is potential harm for the author, from people thinking they’ve said things they haven’t, and wouldn’t, say (if those things put the author in a bad light because they make the argument worse, or the data analysis worse, etc.). A number of the authors in Redfield’s survey said they would be worried about possible misrepresentation of the authors’ interpretations of results. Other authors worried that others might think they had self-plagiarized–published the same thing twice, without citing their earlier publication.

It might seem on the surface that the CC-BY license allows such things to happen, but as Redfield points out in one of her blog posts, CC-BY (and all CC licenses that have “attribution” as one of their requirements) have a “no endorsement” clause: those who use a work licensed CC-BY and alter it in some way, must not indicate that the original author endorses the revision of the work. The legal code of the CC-BY license makes this even clearer–see section 4(b)(iv) here. 

Since the publisher of the work Redfield discusses listed the authors as “contributors,” and did not state that the articles had been previously published elsewhere and edited for publication in the book, one could make the case that the way they’ve presented the articles suggests “endorsement” by the authors. Redfield argues for this point here.

But since the authors in this case were not told that their articles were going to be published in the book, they did not have a chance to give an endorsement or not. Nor does CC-BY require that original creators of works with a CC-BY license be informed that their works are being reused and adapted.

What should be done?

My first thought, upon seeing the first one or two of Redfield’s blog posts, was that this problem could be solved by simply educating authors about the various CC licenses, and about what is allowed under CC-BY, so they can decide whether they want to use CC-BY or some other license. I thought that those who wanted to avoid the problems noted above could choose a different license, like perhaps CC-BY-SA (share-alike)–which would require that any use of the work have an equivalent license on it, possibly reducing incentives to republish collections of such works–or CC-BY-ND (no derivatives)–which would not allow anything to be changed. There are several problems with this response.

1. It may not be the case that authors have a choice of licenses when publishing in an open access journal, or when publishing an open access article in an otherwise non-open access journal. PLOS One, for example, does not give you a choice–you have to use CC-BY or not publish there. So do BioMedCentral and PeerJ and  Sage Open. Some publishers do allow a choice, such as Wiley (you can choose a license for your open access article in an otherwise non-open access journal), and Taylor and Francis.

But those who are worried about reuse of CC-BY articles might just choose not to publish in the OA journals that require CC-BY (this does not apply to researchers who are mandated to publish open access as CC-BY, of course). Unless some other things change. Like possibly the following.

2. As noted above, the republishing of open access articles without citing the original publications and licenses under which they were published may be in violation of the license terms of the original articles. If so, then it seems logical that legal action should be taken against the publishers who violate those terms. This is what Redfield suggests in a blog post.

I agree, but who should take such legal action? It’s too much to ask for individual authors to take legal action, unless they can find legal counsel who will take on the case without charging anything, or very much. Who among us has enough money to pay attorneys and other fees to sue a publisher?

Redfield suggests perhaps the journal publishers should take on the duty of suing such book publishers, which seems to me to make sense because the book publishers are violating the terms of the journal publishers’ own licenses. But this raises other issues, as discussed in the comments to that post (authors are the ones with legal standing to sue because they hold copyright, journals may have to raise article processing fees to cover such activities).

One might also ask: what motivation do journals have to go after publishers who are redistributing content that the journal is not making money from each time it is accessed anyway? They have made money through other means than subscriptions or fee for access, so would they be motivated to try to stop such republication? Perhaps, if enough authors shy away from publishing open access articles because of fears of this sort of thing happening.

Conclusion

The bigger point here is the following. Even if you don’t think this is a big deal (and many don’t, as evidenced by comments on Redfield’s blog posts about this issue), it appears that there are a good number of authors who do, and who may then choose not to publish in open access journals because of it. This is ignoring the point, of course, that many researchers are now being mandated to do so; there are still quite a few who are not…though this may change soon.

Even if a journal allows a choice of licenses, authors may wonder if, were it to be the case that the license was violated, they or someone else would be able to take action to do something about it. And if no one is doing anything about it, then what’s to stop this sort of thing from spreading further, if it’s lucrative? 

Whether it is a profit-making business, whether significant numbers of individuals and libraries are buying such books, remains to be seen. And the more that authors are required to publish open access works, the more this sort of thing might become lucrative, if it isn’t already. But I think this is an issue worth paying attention to and trying to figure out what can and should be done about the violation of open access licenses in open access journals, even if one doesn’t think that has happened in this particular case.

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