 Welcome everybody. So again the title of today's event is raising the impact of research, scholarship, and education through openness. And it's my pleasure to introduce our two guests. Nick Schocki is director of student advocacy at the scholarly publishing and academic resources coalition, otherwise known as SPARK. As SPARK's first director of student advocacy, Nick is responsible for growing the organization's relationship with the student community as well as managing the right to research coalition, a group of local, national, and international student organizations. This coalition advocates for researchers, universities, and governments to adopt more open scholarly publishing practices. Under Nick's direction, the coalition has grown to represent just under seven million students in approximately a hundred countries around the world and has facilitated student lobbying in more than 200 congressional offices. Nicole Allen is director of open education at SPARK and Nicole leads SPARK's work on open educational resources, or OER, you may have seen that acronym, focusing on public policy and engaging and supporting the library community on this issue. She joined SPARK in 2013, already established as a leading figure in the open educational resources movement, with seven years of experience in advocacy and grassroots organizing on open educational resources and related public interest issues. Please join me in welcoming Nick and Nicole. Thank you for the fantastic introduction, I don't think I'll have to say too much more on sort of our backgrounds, but I will just mention that SPARK, or the scholarly publishing and academic resources coalition, is a library membership organization of here in North America, a little bit more than 220 academic and research libraries, including the UC system, as well as more than 800 academic and research libraries all around the world, and really sort of tasked with representing the library community's interest in creating a more sustainable and open system of scholarly communication. And sort of the early years that focused a lot on awareness raising of the issue of the cost of academic journals, educating authors about their rights and sort of trying to get them to amend their copyright transfer agreements, but local areas lately in the last five to six years, we've been doing an increasing amount of work at the federal level advocating for good public policy, specifically around making publicly funded research freely available, and now actually at the state level as well here in California, which I will talk more about in a little bit. I also just wanted to say a couple words about the Right to Research Coalition, which is an organization that I've had the immense pleasure of directing since we founded it in 2009. And as was mentioned, it's grown from six original student organizations to actually more than 75 now that represent, I think, a huge number of students around the world in a lot of different countries, and I think the sort of expansion of this coalition really speaks to the importance of this issue to the student community and all sort of sprinkle in some references to our work with students in this presentation. But one of the themes that we hope to sort of leave you with is to really try to put the next generation of scholars and researchers at the core of everything that you all do to promote open access and open educational resources. One sort of housekeeping thing I want to mention is that we expected this to be a pretty diverse audience with lots of you that are open access experts, but then also many of you that probably are coming to this issue with sort of fresh eyes. So we tried to craft a presentation that would be interesting to those of you that know sort of a lot of the basics that we might talk about. Try to give you some additional tools and stories to use when talking about these issues with faculty and students, but also make it accessible to people that aren't as comfortable with the issue or less experienced. Though with the UC system, I think it's probably a much higher level of knowledge than not many of the campuses that we talk about, which is fantastic. So to begin in earnest, I just want to start us off by saying that this problem of accessing academic research articles is one that I think everybody is intimately familiar with. We speak on campuses and at organization meetings all around the world. And I really have yet to find students, even at well-funded institutions, that don't perfectly identify with this exact feeling of finding the exact abstract that you're looking for for your research or for your class, or to give to your students, then clicking to actually read the thing and then facing having to pay about $35 to rent the access to the article for 48 hours. It's a frustration that I think has become incredibly common, very universal. But unfortunately, I think a lot of times people don't understand why this happens. We sort of become used to hitting these paywalls and just moving on and either dealing without that article or going through the trouble of trying to access it in different ways. Many of them oftentimes illegal in terms of asking people to share copies that they have access to that you don't by sending a PDF that you might not necessarily have the rights to do that. But unfortunately, I don't think people see what causes this problem. And that is, I think, the incredibly high cost of academic journals. These are the average prices for a selection of subjects. You can see that in health sciences, the average ISI index journal is nearly $1,500 per year, which is a bargain compared to chemistry, which is almost $4,500. And unfortunately, they're actually a little bit more than 15 entire academic disciplines where the average journal price is over $1,000 for one institutional subscription for one year to rent access. And you can see what these prices, they add up really quickly and it forces universities and in terms of libraries. I know this room has many librarians and it forces you to make difficult choices in terms of what you can subscribe to or what you have to forego. Or even if you do spend lots and lots of money subscribing to journals, it forces you to make difficult decisions and where you take that money from and also restricts access to the majority of the world's population that doesn't have this kind of money to pay for these subscriptions. And so we've seen over the last 20, 30 years, libraries spending increasing amounts of their budget to pay for these expensive journals. So you can see since 1986, libraries, rather, are spending a little bit more than 400% more on journal subscriptions than they were in 1986. And I think this just shows the incredible rise of the cost of these journals. They've risen, I think, on average, somewhere between two to three times above inflation year in and year out for decades. And I think this is something that's been acutely felt here in the UC system. I know many of you will probably remember four years ago, the negotiation between the Nature Publishing Group and the UC system over the institutional subscription to their journals with nature wanting to raise the price by, I think, about 400% year on year, you know, which I think just highlights the fact that the systems gotten away from what it wasn't originally intended to do. And in fact, major media outlets are starting to see this. And in fact, two years ago, the economist called academic publishing, quote, a license to print money, which I think is really disturbing that the systems become really good at printing money, but not necessarily being so good at the thing it's actually designed to do, which is to disseminate this information to the widest possible audience. And I think part of the reason why is that, in fact, publishing has, in many cases, become a big business. This is a graph comparing the profit margin of some publishers here in red to some other types of industries. And you can see that Elsevier and Spring are two of the largest academic publishers are more profitable than McDonald's, than AT&T, than ExxonMobil, than Disney. And this is, I think, fairly typical. If you look at their financial statements, you know, the larger commercial publishers earn profit margins in excess of 25, 30, or even 40 percent year on year for decades. And in fact, this data is a little bit out of date. And in fact, Elsevier, this sort of second furthest to the right, actually earned about a 39 percent profit margin last year and cleared, I think, about a billion dollars in just profit alone. And so I think this just illustrates how great the system is for printing money, as the economist has mentioned. But I think shows how much money is actually getting sucked away from academies, from the libraries. That's money that could go to support research, to support students. So I think this sort of begs the question naturally, you know, is there a reason why academic publishing needs to be this expensive? And I think for I think everybody in this room that's engaged in this process, we know that the answer is no for a number of reasons. One is just the huge amount of effort that goes into publishing that's voluntary, that's contributed for free, right? Authors signed away in many cases, they're copyright to journals without the expectation of payment. This is like payback for every time I was in class on my phone and off. You know, so authors, you know, are not paid for the work that's published in academic journals. In fact, in many disciplines, it's common, you know, for researchers, in fact, to be paid to be published even in subscription based in journals. You know, researchers also contribute an extraordinary amount of effort and peer review for free, you know, that they give away as part of their service to their discipline. And then as editors, I think researchers are often paid very little and sometimes nothing at all to serve as editors for journals. So all of these inputs are free. But then on the other side, you know, as a commercial publisher, each article is in a sense its own monopoly, right? Because in order to get published in academic journal, the research has to be novel, which means that you can't just stop subscribing to one journal if it becomes too expensive and find that information somewhere else like you would with a newspaper or a magazine. You know, you have to subscribe to that journal because it's the only place that you can get that information that your students and that your researchers need to get an up-to-date education or to do their work. And on top of all this, there's a report released by HSBC that estimated about 80% of research is in fact publicly funded in the first place, which I think just adds even more fuel to this fire, right? Because we as the public are paying for a huge part of all this research but in fact aren't getting access to the valuable thing that's produced at the end of the road. And I think there's a compelling argument to be had that as the public that's funding this research, both here in the US and around the world, that that should be made freely available to the public that actually paid for it. So I think, you know, we have to sort of reflect on the question of whether this publication system that we have really reflects the values that we have as researchers, as scholars, as librarians, you know, and whether the system that we entrust to distribute the knowledge that we work so hard to create, whether it reflects those values. And then just to close before I hand things over to Nicole, you know, I think you have to ask the question, why this matters? What's the impact of, you know, restricted access to this knowledge? And I think the impact extends, you know, to a vast number of areas. I could talk about, you know, this for hours. But, you know, I think for students, it restricts what they can get access to. I'm sure that, you know, students here at UCLA hit many fewer paywalls than a lot of other students around the world. But still, I'm sure that it happens. You know, less well funded institutions hitting paywalls is the norm rather than the exception. And especially when you think of other types of institutions of higher education, like community colleges where they don't have the types of subscription budgets to pay for these journals or then students in other parts of the world, particularly in low and middle income countries that have, you know, the capacity to learn from this research and to build upon it, but don't have, you know, the financial wherewithal to be able to pay in many cases for these incredibly expensive journals and just locks them out, which in fact actually harms us because that's, you know, the majority of the world's population that can't build on this research and slows and turn the pace of progress. The one other thing I'll mention is that I think the current system also prevents us from, you know, getting breakthroughs that we never would expect that when this information is available to anybody with an internet connection, really interesting things happen that we couldn't have predicted. And I think for me, the most powerful story of one such example is this incredible 16-year-old named Jack Andraca who won the Intel International Science Fair in 2012 with a novel diagnostic for pancreatic ovarian and lung cancer that he built using carbon nanotubes at the age of 15, largely based on research articles he either got for free online through open access publishers like the Public Library of Science. I also know that he stole his parents' credit card and spent a lot of money on article processing or on buying access to articles. And for those of you, this picture of Jack might be a little bit more familiar. It's sort of made the rounds on the internet, but this diagnostic is really incredible. I mean, it's still sort of early days for its development, but it has the potential, you know, to be a much more powerful diagnostic tool than the current sort of best tool that they have, particularly to diagnose pancreatic cancer. You know, it's much faster. It's much cheaper and actually much more sensitive than the current test, at least in their initial studies. You know, and this is incredibly, did this at the age of 16. And if you actually visit with the Intel International Science Fair, as I had the pleasure of doing last year, you know, you see that there are actually lots of students like Jack that are out there. And when you talk to them about the importance of academic research, they use these articles in their preparation for the Science Fair, because to enter that, it has to be novel research. And it's really impressive to see, you know, what students are able to do. But this is only one example. And once you think about all the researchers that are out there that don't have access to this information, particularly in other countries, I think you can start to see, you know, the tremendous amount of research that we just miss out on because people don't have access to these resources. So with that, I won't turn things over to Nicole to talk about the problem and educational resources for about. We have to make the commuter talk. We have more to talk about. Yeah, so we decided to structure this talk. We're going to go back and forth talking about research and education, talking about the problem first, then what exactly OER and open access are and some of the things that you all can do. So my work at Spark focuses on open access to educational materials. So of course, Spark was born out of the rising cost of subscription journals. And as we've made progress over the last decade and a half toward open access, we've started to expand our work to include other outputs of the research process, which includes educational materials that, you know, distill research down into the foundational knowledge that young scholars and students need to advance in their fields and also digital data that underlies the research articles that we make open access. So my work at Spark focuses on open educational resources and we'll get into exactly what that is in a few minutes. But first, I want to talk about what many of you already know, which is the rising cost of higher education and the role that the cost of course materials plays in that. So over the last decade, the cost of college textbooks that's the red line has increased about 82%. And that's three times the rate of inflation. It just is just a touch slower than tuition and fees, which we know rose rapidly after the economic crisis. So what this tells us is what we already know is that just textbook prices are out of control. In putting this in the larger context of what is happening in higher education right now, the average student is graduating with almost $30,000 in debt and about seven in 10 students graduate with debt. And that's undergraduate. When it gets to the graduate level, it goes up much higher. Here in California, the average debt is a little bit lower than the national average, it's around 20,000. But still, you know, students are leaving their education and starting their lives as citizens already in the hole. And textbook costs are a contributing factor to that. The average student spends about $1,200 a year on books and supplies for their courses. And that is a significant financial barrier because in many cases it's one of the last expenses they pay. And it's an out-of-pocket cost as opposed to something like tuition that can be offset by grants and loans. In some cases, students are able to apply financial aid to textbooks, but in a lot of cases it runs out before they get to textbooks. And when students walk into the bookstore or go onto the campus website and see prices like this, you know, these are 10 high-enrollment academic subjects. And the average price for these textbooks is $175 for a new book. That's insanity. These are undergraduate courses where the material in the subjects is well-established and the books cost $175 to get it new. You can save money by buying it used or renting or getting an e-book, but this is a major barrier to education. And it contributes to the rising costs that students have to pay and is driving students deeper into debt. And unlike expenses like tuition and living expenses where it's hard to make any progress besides small incremental changes to reduce costs with textbooks, it is possible to dramatically reduce these costs. So think about that as we move forward. So just to give one example, and I don't mean to pick on UCSB here, but this micro-economics textbook costs $245. It's just one example. And what we're seeing, so we all know that the digital technology is enabling us to do new things, to share information freely, to edit information and publish it online. And we're incorporating it into higher education in a lot of different ways. And of course, textbook publishers are moving in this direction as well. This is that same textbook sold through an e-textbook platform, and it costs about $90. So is that progress? I mean, yes it is in the sense that it's not $230, but that's still a lot of money. And especially when we're making a compromise on how students are able to access the material. You get, for $90, you get 180 days of access, which means that there is no option to buy this digital book. If we shift to a model that is entirely subscription-based for textbooks, it means that students no longer get to keep the materials that they study in school. And of course, right now, a lot of students are doing that anyway, because in many cases, the only way to afford next semester's books is to sell back this semester's books. But in the digital age, as we're moving forward into a world where we can take advantage of technology, this is not progress, this is not the system we want. We don't want to turn education into something like this, where as soon as you finish reading it, it goes away. So I think that the students are, as you heard in the introduction, I've done a lot of work with students for many years, and this is the mindset that I hear, is that, so, okay, if books are digital, why are they so expensive? And does it really need to be this way? And it's a tricky situation, because the textbook market doesn't work like normal consumer markets, like we've seen the e-book market for novels. The prices there are relatively reasonable when you think about it, but it hasn't really played out the same way in the textbook market. And it's because of this dynamic where the decision maker for what material students need to buy is the professor, and once they decide what book to buy, the student has to pay no matter how much it costs, so they're kind of a captive market. And of course, we all know that professors are the right people to be making those decisions, because they're the experts and know what's best for their courses, but it creates a system where publishers can effectively print money by raising prices really high, like 82% over the last decade and charging things like $230 for an economics textbook, which, when you think about it, is kind of hilarious, because to understand all of this, you need to buy the economics textbook. But anyway, so this is the market we have to contend with, and it's about breaking the cycle. And what this has driven us to is a point where it's breaking. About two thirds of students now say that they have skipped buying a required course material because the cost is too high. And about a third of students are saying that at some point they earned a lower grade because they couldn't afford to buy the textbook. And really, in this system, students can't learn effectively if they can't afford the materials. And we do have the potential to solve this problem. So we wanna talk about how do we enable that? How do we take advantage of today's technology? And how do we come up with a model to effectively share educational materials? So I wanna go back to just take a step back and talk about kind of where we've been with how we share information. So back in 500 years ago, we were sharing information by writing it down on pieces of paper. And then when Gutenberg invented the printing press, it suddenly became possible to print it on paper by placing little letters into blocks and using that to stamp pieces of paper and bind them together. And it was possible for more people to have access to books. And then now we have kind of automated systems that are able to print books like this. But when we're dealing with physical objects, whether it's journals or textbooks or CDs, to reach people with those things, you need to create and ship a copy of it to every person you want to access it. But when things become digital and online, it's possible to distribute them to a virtually worldwide audience instantly at very, very low marginal cost. So we have this huge potential in front of us to distribute information freely. And it's not just that. It's not just about distributing information. It's possible to create information. So whereas before you had to place the little blocks into a type set of page, now we can just edit it in Word or whatever word processor you use. If you want to print it, just click print. And you can publish a document online instantly and share it with the entire world. And we've seen this play out in so many different ways. The newspapers have become online and now can be read by the entire world instead of just the people who have access to the printed copy. We've seen encyclopedias that used to be books turn into things like Wikipedia where it has a vast wealth of knowledge that not only is more detailed but is updated in real time. And a print book is out of date the second it's printed whereas this is updated continuously. And it's become increasingly social. So where before people were able to connect by posting physical things on physical bulletin boards we have things like Craigslist. So there are lots of ways our world is becoming more personalized and interconnected. And when we think about research and education we need to ask ourselves how do we enable everything that this environment makes possible? And that's the framework that we talk about when we say openness for open access and open educational resources. So in general openness refers to two things. So to be open something needs to be free meaning that it is no cost and there are no barriers to access. And then it needs to be open in the sense that you have the right to fully use it. And this is important because free is important and allows you to access it but even if you're able to get something freely you don't necessarily have the right to use it in all the ways you want. For example, if you wanna say these PowerPoint slides if you wanted to give a presentation like this this PowerPoint slides are posted on the Spark website you could download them but you don't necessarily have the right to use them. Why? Copyright. And by default under US law copyright is all rights reserved and applied instantly after you create something. And what all rights reserved effectively means is call me maybe. So in order to be able to use copyrighted material you need to ask permission. Whether that's you want to use it in a different context or you wanna change it or you wanna translate it into another language you have to ask permission. And we all use copyrighted material every day and especially in digital forms and we're all used to these things. License agreements that pop up when you get something on iTunes that has all these terms written in lawyer speak telling you what you can and can't do and it's usually threatening language like you may not lend, lease, lend, redistribute or sub-license, the Apple software, whatever it is. So we're all used to this but to enable the open aspect of openness we use a similar concept which we call an open license. And what that effectively does is amend the default terms of copyright from all rights reserved to some rights reserved allowing everybody to freely and openly use it. And some of you may be familiar with this company or organization called Creative Commons that produces a number of easy to use open licenses that have different permissions in them but all grant the general permissions that unite all open licenses which are the permission to freely and openly use. It's granted in advance to everybody forever. So once you get the permission, you always have it. And generally, if you do use it under this license you need to make sure that you attribute whoever created it as they request. And of course, this framework plays out differently in open access and open educational resources and I'm gonna turn it over to Nick in a second to talk about open access but I just wanna reiterate the question, how do we advance toward openness? How do we take advantage of everything the digital environment has to offer? And this framework of openness is the ideal and it's how we fully enable our systems for sharing scholarly knowledge and for education to advance into the future. And we look at openness as the ideal and I think the mission is to push our systems now as far in that direction as possible. So with that, I'll turn it back over to Nick to talk about open access.