On Friday, October 29th, the Department of Education officially started their #GoOpen campaign. You might be wondering, "What the heck is the #GoOpen campaign?" Well, answering that question takes a bit of research.
#GoOpen is the Dept. of Education's new campaign to reduce the cost of public education, supply school districts with up to date, quality materials, and ensure that the public owns the product of research paid for with public funds.
#GoOpen, and the new proposed rule are the first measure released by the Department of Education toward those goals. Is it a good one? It seems likely. And, it needs your support. This proposed rule does move the department closer to those stated goals by ensuring that public funds do not directly support private profit.
You can, and I suggest you do, comment on the proposed rule on regulations.gov. Well, you can once the proposed rule is actually added to the registry.
Continue below the squib.
What is OER?
Open Education Resources are the future. That's a big statement to make, but not so hard to support. OER's are any resources that are published under a Creative Commons license, meaning that they can be republished without the payment of royalties. They do, however have two small costs that are consistent with what other products produced under a Creative Commons license also share: a republisher must give credit to the original author, and no profit can be derived from the resultant intellectual property.
The main benefit to OER's is its own main detractor; The fact that it's royalty-free also means that publishers can't charge rent on their work. One can imagine what the text book industry has to say about the #GoOpen campaign and OER's in general. Some of their concerns might even be valid.
What does the proposed rule actually do?
The new rule, released on Saturday, Nov 30th, changes exclusions to existing rules: allow the public to reproduce the work as long as the author is given credit for the original work.
This means that, once a grant is given to an individual or institution, the work funded and produced by that grant belongs to both the individual or institution that received the grant and the public. The grantee retains the rights to the work and product, they just have to share the rights with the public. They can still sell it to a publisher, and receive royalties from it, but the public can reproduce it free of charge.
Does this new rule represent a change in direction?
The Department of Education, since 1980, has been moving toward the creative commons license requirement. This is just the latest push towards free reproduction of federally funded research that minimizes the profit motive in educational materials.
What all of this means.
This all sounds a little strange, I know, but in higher education and private industry, where this research is produced, the cost of research is largely swallowed up by grants. Federal grants pay for basic research in all areas of science, including education, medicine, the social sciences, neurology, biology, chemistry, and physics. Nobel laureates were funded by federal grants that have opened the world of DNA, quantum mechanics, solar energy, among other notable fields. Figures from 2009 report that over 58% of all research is paid for by federal agencies according the to the SEI.
Grants have become more competitive over time, and recently, much to the chagrin of administrators feeling the cinching belt of the federal budget in lower outlays for publicly funded research, grants are not as common as they once were. The fact, though, remains that grants cover the cost of salaries of researchers and technicians budgeted for in the grant proposal which also must pass the scrutiny of the approval process.
Administrators have come to depend more on grant funding to pay for a portion of the salaries of Professors. Faculty are expected to not only produce research but secure grants for that research. There is a contemporary debate on whether this is actually good for universities on the whole as federal funds are not the only funds available to researchers, particularly in STEM fields (Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology, though this acronym generally includes science regarding medicine). There are very serious questions being asked about research produced by private industry in the wake of scandals that have shocked the entire system, including the science of tobacco, global warming, and recent pharmaceutical innovations.
Making this arguably small change in this one field of research is not likely to substantially impact the debates around STEM fields, or change the way science is produced. The Department of Education argues that this rule would reduce the competitive advantage of grant holders in education fields and thereby reduce the profitability of companies that apply for federal grants to fund their consumer oriented products. It is arguable that this is a "pay your own way" statement from the Dept of Education. That, if one is to seek exclusive profit from the publication of science, one is obliged to pay for that science.
The debate regarding the "breast cancer gene" in particular, goes to the heart of this rule change. While the US Supreme Court and most recently Australia has ruled that the BRCA1 gene cannot be patented, movement by private industry to monopolize the products of basic and applied federally funded research is ongoing. The potential cost of private monopoly in medicine alone is catastrophic.
These arguments can be applied to educational materials, as they directly impact the quality of life in the United States. Public, and private, education relies on materials produced by the research industry. These are then managed and shaped into products by private publishers whose price to consumers, and profits have grown substantially over the last 40 years. The cost of text books have increase by an astounding 1200% over that time. It is one of the reasons that the overall cost of a college education has exploded.
But those costs are not limited to higher education. Text books designed for K-12 supply a massive, publicly funded market. As publishers have merged, near-monopolies have dominated the market and made it difficult for smaller firms to compete on a national, or even regional scale. The advent of Learning Systems, a systems approach to grade-level subjects that include both print and digital resources, have exacerbated this problem. High costs, high profits, and arguably more corporate control of content are the result. All these problems we've recently seen in Texas with the controversial treatment of the history of slavery in America.
Is this proposed rule a good idea?
Yes, I think it is. It doesn't address individual researcher pay as much as it addresses the cost and the control of content. However, addressing the problem of ensuring a middle class income for researchers and professors is not its intent. What it does intend to do, and what it does, is reduce the private profit and control of educational resources. By requiring a creative commons license on research products funded by the Department of Education, it ensures that such research is available to all children and not just those who can afford to pay for it.
Slick presentation and integrated learning environments are still available as a potential source of revenue for private publishers. Researchers and professors who compliment their base pay by writing text books are still compensated through that system. The only loss of profitability is that from the initial royalties on a research product they were already paid to produce. More often than not, researchers do not write text books as anyone who has read research papers knows. "Readability" is somewhat of an in-joke.
Is it the best way? No. It has problems, but the problems it has do not outweigh the potential benefits. Amazon, Microsoft, Emodo and the Illinois Shared Learning Environment have committed to investing in modes of distribution and support for creative commons educational resource products. Through their efforts, educators will be able to search for, and obtain OER content that will help all students succeed.
Does this create a two-tiered market for educational materials, one for the rich and one for everyone else? No, as it already exists. Does it validate such a market? Unfortunately yes. Nevertheless, the proposed rule presents a stop-gap so that the children of everyone else aren't left too far behind. It might even, depending on how it plays out, compress the quality of content across the board, as is my expectation.
Add your comments.
Whatever your take on the #GoOpen campaign, and the push to offer research products in a creative commons license, add your comments and concerns to the registry on regulations.gov. Participatory democracy cannot work without you.
Mon Nov 02, 2015 at 4:41 AM PT: UPDATE:
I'd like to ask that each member of the community here that has knowledge or experience with OER's write a diary of their own to help spread the word. Your voice is needed to help carry this issue forward.