 Hi everybody. My name is Robert Lawson. I'm an instructional designer with curriculum development at Northwest College, and I'm also one of the program co-chairs who helped to put together the program for this year's conference. And I'm very excited right now to introduce our next keynote speaker. This is someone I encountered for the first time at the University of Alberta during Open Education Week. It was a webinar and kind of an introduction to open education resources, and I really had no kind of background in open education at that time. I probably couldn't even have told you what a NoER is. So listening to him speak really helped me to understand the open education landscape. It helped me to understand what the Creative Commons licenses were. And he also introduced some very compelling introductory research on how open educational resources are equal to or in some cases better than traditional publisher resources. So it was a wonderful moment, and it really inspired me to in part get into open education. And so therefore, I'm very excited that we are going to welcome Dr. Cable Green to speak to us today. And he's been a very prominent figure in the open education landscape for a number of years. He's done some very exciting work in looking at how open licensing, open education can help to resolve complex problems, can help to help us to reach the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. And I think this is just fantastic. It really illustrates the power of open education to help us with these with these very complex issues. So I think he's a wonderful choice to really speak to our conference theme, Building a Sustainable World Through Open Education. And I just want to mention that he's done so much work in open education. He's been involved in so many different projects. They're just too many to name, but you know, there's the open course library, open up resources, digital public good standard, UNESCO recommendations on OER, open science, open climate campaign, and he's also been involved in the open climate data project, among many others. So please join me in extending a very warm welcome to Dr. Cable Green, the Director of Open Knowledge for Creative Commons and a real trailblazer in the field of open education. Hi everybody. First, a big thank you for the invitation to come speak. It's always an honor to come to this conference at all and to be one of the keynotes is a great honor. So thank you for that. And thank you to the Program Committee and the folks at OE Global for the kind invitation. As I was sitting there listening to people talk about sustainability, I realized there are several people in the audience that have sustained me. So Kathy Casserly, if you didn't know, actually hired me 12 years ago at Creative Commons. I wouldn't even be in this business if it wasn't for Kathy. And so Kathy, thank you for that. There are several people here that you may know. I almost died a few years ago, had a liver transplant. And there are people here in the audience that actually came to the hospital and took care of me when I was there. And one of our friends, David Wiley, who actually gave me part of his liver, which was an important part of my sustainability. If you don't know the story, he actually asked his surgeon to put a Creative Commons license on the piece of liver that was coming from him to me and because he wanted attribution forever. And the surgeons did not think that was funny. And they told him to stop talking about that. So I wanted to lighten the mood a bit because we'll talk about some serious topics. So today, what I want to talk about in terms of sustainability is I think that several sectors of open that I'll talk about today have hit a bit of a moment where it seems like we may have hit some existential threats, existential threats, and a bit of a crisis moment. But also I think there's tremendous opportunity. And so I want to talk about talk through what I think over the last 20 years collectively we've agreed upon in terms of some foundational principles and how we might use those to go forward. So this is a brand new keynote. I've titled it Diamond Open Knowledge. It'll make more sense in a moment. So, of course, all these slides unless otherwise noted are CC by. I have reached out to several colleagues. You'll see them credited at the bottom of the slides. I actually don't know if their their works are CC by. So please just use mine if you want to reuse or reach out to those other folks. I am with Creative Commons. I'm the director of open knowledge at CC. As I said, I'm going on 13 years. I was director of open ed for a long time, was CEO for a while. And now have a broader portfolio of open knowledge, which which I'll talk about in a moment. CC, if you're not familiar with us, we are a global nonprofit organization. We are kind of the de facto open licenses steward for open copyright licenses that the world uses. We're 20 years old, 20 more than that, 22 years old now. The licenses work everywhere. And like OE Global, we have teams around the world. We call them CC country chapters and they help countries and other communities locally. Just a few facts about the licenses, which sometimes people don't know. Licenses are free. They've always been free. They always will be free and to ensure that we've dedicated them all of our legal tools to the public domain, so they're there forever. We are 20 years old. This will be important in just a moment and some other facts here. Of course, the CC licenses are legal tools. They're backed by the full force of copyright. They've never lost in court, et cetera, et cetera. So that's that's all fine. And that's an important part of what we do is the steward of the licenses. But that's not the most important thing that we do. So our vision of Creative Commons is to to work on, create, improve a world where knowledge and culture are equitably shared in ways that serve the public interest. So you see that we're already very well aligned with the strategic plan at OE Global that was just put up. We're talking about public interest, public good. That'll be the main theme of today's chat. So I mentioned the licenses. I, of course, won't go through these today, but we have this whole suite of licenses so that people can have the tools that they want and public domain tools as well. We proudly put the we say we put the open and open access research and open educational resources, open data and other sectors of open. I'm mostly going to talk about today. I'm not going to talk about open culture as much. That's another program area at CC. I'm going to focus on open knowledge. And when I say open knowledge, this is what I mean. I mean open education and all the components of that. We mean open access research, open data, the broader establishment of open science, which is kind of parcel and part, or open access research is part of that, but open science is broader. The open communities in these spaces and then the open policy that exists usually at funders to support all of these various areas. So I'm going to take a moment to go through what some of our key principles are at Creative Commons when we are deciding whether or not we want to work on an open knowledge project. So bear with me. These principles will become more important as we go through this. So first, and you've heard me say this for years, publicly funded knowledge should be open by default. And by that, we mean all of this stuff, research, educational resources, et cetera, should be open by default, should be openly licensed. The data, where possible, should be in the public domain. And there should be a zero embargo period. We shouldn't have to wait to get access to open access research to open educational resources, et cetera. That's point one. Second, public funds allocated to produce this open knowledge should be spent as efficiently and effectively as we possibly can. Open tends to be more efficient almost always than closed. Why do we put this point in? Because we never have unlimited funds. We need to be effective and efficient with the funds that we have. And I am a firm believer that that's part of our responsibility as stewards of public funds, that we owe it to the taxpayers that paid these to be effective and efficient with them. Third, this publicly funded knowledge should be stewarded, hosted, served up, analyzed by public institutions, the academy, and or trusted non-profits. Okay, this will be kind of a key theme throughout this talk here. As we're designing these systems, we should design from the core out to ensure that they are socially just, that they are equitable so that these public goods can be accessed, shared, contributed to, revised by everyone in the public. Next, commercial organizations where we need them should be treated as work for hire. We should hire them when we need them. If we sign contracts with them, we should ensure that copyright stays with us, the public or the public institutions, or the individual authors who are writing it and not go to the commercial entities. Which is this last point, that the copyright or other intellectual property rights of publicly funded knowledge should be held by us and not by commercial entities. And nor should we transfer the ownership of publicly funded knowledge to commercial entities. You may say, well, obviously not, but in fact we do this all the time, especially in the area of research and data. So I've broken the talk up into four areas. I'm gonna talk about the opportunities we have in front of us. Some of the challenges or headwinds that we're facing at the moment. Changing landscape, there's some interesting new things happening. And then a bit of call to action of what we can do next. So what's happened in the last 20 years? Well, a lot, as you've seen from GOGN and OER Global and Creative Commons. There are a lot of organizations which are hitting their 20th anniversary. Iskme is another one with OER Commons. There are several examples where folks are hitting 10 and 20 years. So over the past 20 years, we've had this suite of tools that we've all leveraged and we've taught other people how to use. Things went digital. We can make perfect digital copies. We've had the internet for quite a while where we can share this digital stuff. We've been able to openly license it so we can legally share it and make changes to it as we see fit. And then the costs around these spaces, the cost of computing, the cost of cloud computing, the cost of network, the cost of devices has fallen. We still have digital divide issues, but those costs continue to come down. And so what all this netted us was a set of a tool bag where we could legally share digital knowledge at the marginal cost of zero. This is incredibly important in terms of access for more people. It was important in terms of efficiency of the expenditure of public funds. There was good arguments and continued to be good arguments to be made around return on investment for the investment in open things with public monies. And we reduced friction. It's much easier to share things that are digital and that are open. And so if you look at the literature, you'll find across all of these various categories of open knowledge that pick your variable. Open is oftentimes a better and a more effective way to do education research data, et cetera. Okay, so we've had those tool sets. This is nothing new. We know all this. We seem to have lost our way when it comes to what we commonly refer to as digital public goods. And so the key phrase here or the key part of that is public goods. So I oftentimes am sitting down with foundations or with national governments or provincial governments and they get caught up in, oh, why should that be open? Is that a threat to the business community? And I say, stop, wait a moment. Why is it that your government is interested in science? Why do you fund science in Brazil? And they'll say, well, funding science is important. We need to understand the universe. We have to understand our country. We have to understand people. We have to understand problems and how to solve diseases. And I say, okay, why do you fund research? Why do you find education in your country? Well, you know, there's all these really good reasons. And very quickly we get to a conversation where we say, yes, knowledge is a public good. And public goods should be funded with public funds. And yet we continuously allow publicly funded knowledge to be extracted, to be commercialized. I was actually warned about being in Edmonton and using the word extracted in my talk, so I apologize for that. But we continue to allow knowledge to be extracted and commercialized by commercial entities and have the knowledge extracted, commodified and then sold back to us, right? And so this is something that we've allowed. Quick side note, I'm not up here to bash commercial entities, not at all. They just have a different set of incentives than we do, right? They are not in the, their mission statement is not produce as many public goods as possible at the highest quality level and make those freely available to as many people as possible. That's not their job. Their job is to build shareholder value and to raise their stock prices and to generate revenue. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just a different set of priorities than often what we're talking about, right? Our foundation principles are things like this, open sharing, advances, universal access to these various areas of knowledge and culture. This is about human rights. If you go and you look at the United Nations foundational documents, you will see things like education is a human right. And they talk about the importance of science for the betterment of humanity. These are not things that ought to be commercialized and put behind paywalls. These are things that we all should have access to. I told you I worked at Creative Commons. Creative Commons just had its 20th birthday. That was a lot of fun. We waved the flag, but we were mostly interested in what do we do in the next 20 years. So we started asking questions. And one of the answers that we came up with is we really want to work on the biggest challenges in the world today. And so what are those biggest challenges? Well, we all talk about these. We looked toward the United Nations sustainable development goals. And we started off by saying, well, which of these? These are all important. These are all unanimously supported by nations around the world through the General Assembly of the United Nations. They all need work, but what's most pressing? We decided to focus on 13, 14, and 15 to start. Climate change, if you haven't heard is a bit of a problem. And so we decided to start there. Our kind of key idea is that, so why Creative Commons? Why should CC of all these various organizations work on the SDGs? And our kind of core argument is that if you want to solve any of these problems, doesn't matter which one you pick. If the knowledge and the culture about these problems is closed and locked up behind a paywall, you don't get to solve the problems. Imagine trying to solve, I don't know, let's pick one. Imagine trying to solve affordable and clean energy, number seven. But all the research about affordable and clean energy is locked up and unless you're rich, you don't get to read the research. What if all the educational resources about affordable and clean energy are also locked up? Now learners don't get to read it. UNESCO just ran a study six, eight months ago that asked the question of the schools, primary and secondary or in the United States, we call them K-12 schools. Of all the schools in the world, how many of them have curriculum on climate education? The answer, and anybody see this study? No, it wasn't zero, it wasn't that bad. It was 48, 49%. Which on the one hand sounds pretty good, like there's a lot of schools that haven't. On the other hand, it's over half of the schools in the world have nothing about climate curriculum. And one of the reasons for that was they can't afford it. It's out of their budget, they can't go buy the curriculum. So why do we not have OER on all of the SDGs made freely available for all schools around the world? And so this is our argument at Creative Commons. If you wanna solve the world's biggest problems, the knowledge and the culture must be open. Knowledge I think we kinda get in this room. We need the education open, educational resources, we need the research, we need the data. That makes sense to us. What about culture? So my colleague Brigitte at Creative Commons leads our open culture program. The idea there is several fold, but the core idea is that if you look at the SDGs, these are all human-caused problems for the most part. And if you don't understand the culture of the humans that caused these problems, you don't understand the culture of the humans that are gonna need to solve these problems today, the knowledge isn't enough. Okay, moving on. So I said we decided to tackle climate and biodiversity first. We took a good hard look at this, and if you look over on the right side of the screen, this is the punchline. How much of the climate research is open? The time scale here was 1980 to 2020. We've got a live dashboard of this. It's constantly updating, and the good news is it's getting more open, but it's still about half. Of all of the climate research in the world is locked up behind paywalls. This also happens to be climate research, which was funded by public governments around the world. So we've given our knowledge over, it's now locked up, our climate researchers can't get access to it. And so it's like this, we've tied one arm behind our backs, trying to work on climate change, and half of the climate research and the data that we've paid for as a public, we can't get access to unless you're a rich institution somewhere that can afford the exorbitant access fees. That's a problem. And so it looks something like this. If you can imagine, these are a bunch of climate researchers around the world. We've cut this paywall, which is stopping knowledge from moving forward. We decided to do something about that. We put together a coalition called the Open Climate Campaign. You'll find this at openclimatecampaign.org if you wanna see more information. And the core idea of the campaign, this is a four-year campaign to promote open access to research, to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis. We know that opening up the research and the research data is not the whole solution. Our argument is, if you want to solve climate change, you had better have access to all the research and all the data, or it's simply a non-starter, right? If you're interested in the campaign, you can sign up. One of the things while we are focused on research and research data for the Open Climate Campaign, we are also, I know there are several people in the room, we've talked to about this, we're also very interested in the open educational resources about climate. So if you have OER about climate at your institution, or you've got climate researchers who, or professors who you think might want to open up their educational resources, please let us know. We're eager to make that part of the campaign as well. Second project that we launched is called our Open Climate Data Project. This is not research data, this is the largest climate data sets in the world. So this is like Copernicus in Europe and the European Space Agency. This is NASA's data in the United States, NOAA's data, all the weather data, and the sea level rise data, and temperature data. So these are big petabytes, terabyte-sized data sets all around the planet, and we brought those folks together and asked the question, how can we share, how can you share your data better than you're sharing it today across a whole host of variables. Legal was certainly one of them. Many of them were not openly licensed or dedicated to the public domain, but a lot of it was about technical interoperability and ease of getting access to an account and getting access to APIs, et cetera. And so we're working with them to make that data more shareable. Same argument, you don't get to solve climate change if the data about climate change is not open and easy to get to. Okay, next, challenges. Everything I'm talking about, about how we want to keep commercial interests as work for hire, commercial interests don't like this. Apologies to any commercial interests that may be in the room. Here, there are several things that commercial entities in various sectors of open are doing to push back on our collective efforts. Here, I just want to highlight two very quickly. The first one in the area of research, for open access research, we started off 20 years ago, 25 years ago, worried about large subscription rates to journals. So journals were very expensive to subscribe to. And basically, you had to be rich if you wanted to read. And then over 20 years, we flipped that. And now you have to be rich if you want to write. And so we have this thing called article processing charges where the journal said, fine, you want everybody to read for free, you're going to pay on the front end instead of paying on the back end and we'll make the same amount of money. And so they have these things called article processing charges where after your article's been peer-reviewed and accepted, you have to pay a fee to the journal. So let me back up a step. Your research was funded with public money from probably your national government. You got the grant, you did the research, your team worked it, you produced multiple articles. Now you want to publish. And what do they ask you for? What do you have to turn over to them? Somebody shout it out? Money. Money and you're a copyright. Right, they want your copyrights and now you own nothing, your national government owns nothing, your educational institution owns nothing and now you've turned over the rights and then they sell it back to you again, right? Rajiv, you have a term for this, what do you call it with your fire extinguisher? What's the phrase? It'll come to him. Right, so this is a real problem and we'll talk about this more in just a minute. The second one in education, and I was just talking with some Canadians here today, this is a big problem in the United States. Apparently this is also hitting all of you in Canada and I think some parts of Europe as well. Our publishers are saying, okay, we've listened to the OER arguments, day one access, reduce costs, making sure everybody, all students have access to it throughout the year. We can play that game as well. We're gonna call it inclusive or equitable access. So I want you to look at the terms. They've taken our terms, kind of like greenwashing if you will, sometimes happens. This is like open washing, coined by our colleague. You guys should go to openwashing.org and see a good definition. And so inclusive access, the idea is that rather than students paying for a curricular cost or textbook costs, all that gets wrapped into and hidden, I would argue, in the cost of tuition. And so then the students simply pay higher tuition and good news, your textbooks and other materials are free. Well, they're not free. They've been hidden, so you're paying for them in your tuition. The problem with these programs are the challenges for all of you who are working to promote the use and production of open educational resources is now the faculty at these institutions. And by the way, these tend to be three year contracts that universities and colleges are getting locked into. The message to the faculty is you've got unlimited access to all of these catalog of commercial materials and you can use them when your students have already paid for them. And so the incentive to use OER because of cost or some of the other arguments may go down. A lot of faculty are still hanging on to OER because they like the open license part of it. They wanna be able to modify it, translate it, use it in the class the way that they want to. But nevertheless, this is a headwind. If you haven't seen inclusive access, it looks like this. The costs are hidden in tuition. There are additional costs for print. There are access typically expires either at the end of the course or when the student matriculates from the institution and these are all rights reserved copyrighted materials. So there's no legal rights to revise or remix. OER, you know the story there. If you want more on this, our colleague, Nicole Allen at Spark runs a great website called inclusiveaccess.org that talks about some of the facts of how this is happening. I'll give you an example that we just faced in the United States. The White House under the current administration did a good job and said, hey, all of the research that we fund with public funds in the United States, we're gonna make it more open and accessible than it was before. So new data sharing standards, we're gonna take it from a 12 month embargo to zero embargo so that the public gets access immediately. There were a bunch of goodies in it. They talked about open licensing for the first time and the importance of text and data mining. So this was a big win. Just a few months later, the American Association of Publishers went to the U.S. Congress with campaign contributions and other incentives and actually put this language into the appropriations bill, which is how we fund operations in the U.S. government. And I quote, none of the funds made available in this appropriations bill may be used to implement, administer, apply, enforce or carry out the new memo from the White House to ensure free, immediate or equitable access to federally funded research. So you can have your nice little policy that says we're gonna share public knowledge, but you can't use any federal money to implement it. This is the kind of fight that they bring at the highest levels of government. They do not want publicly funded knowledge to be open. It is not in their interests and they will do everything they can to make sure that that doesn't happen. Okay, changing landscape. I believe there are some new opportunities in front of us. CC, OE Global, many organizations worked with UNESCO to help write two really important recommendations that recently came out. The first one was the UNESCO REC on OER. This was back in 2019, a few years ago, unanimously adopted by UNESCO member states. Next step was the recommendation on open science. Also unanimously adopted in 2021 by all UNESCO member states. So this is good. Both of these documents say publicly funded knowledge should be open by default. They go further and they talk about the importance of open licensing policies and open procurement. They talk about the values of public knowledge. So we've got these international frameworks that we can lean on, that we can use. Igor talked about the network of open orgs. This is a group of us that convene and we're trying to figure out how can we support national governments around the world to implement the recommendation on OER. There's similar conversations happening around the REC on open science. When we work with national governments, we have scaled impact, right? So this is also something we're doing with the open climate campaign. We're going right to national governments and we're saying to their ministers of science, will you please require that all future, as of this date going forward, all climate research and data is open and now that we have your attention, will you just do that for all publicly funded research? So it seems to me that we're at this point in the conversation where we should be asking, how do we share knowledge, publicly funded knowledge in the most effective, efficient, equitable and socially just way? Well, many organizations have an opinion about this. The European University Association came out and said a just scholarly publishing ecosystem needs to be steered by the research community and its institutions through coordinated policies. Next week is International Open Access Week, their theme, community over commercialization, right? There is, how many people have heard of Diamond Open Access? Okay, a few of us. I've been watching this, this is kind of why I built this keynote in the first place. I've been watching this emerge in the open access space for the last couple of years. Open access, as I mentioned, has watched the space go from really high subscription rates where you had to be rich to read to really high article processing charges where now you have to be rich to write. There are parts of the world that don't have the kind of money which is necessary to pay these high article processing charges and so they started asking the question, this is mostly in Latin America, they're the real leaders in this space. They started asking the question, what could it look like if you didn't have to be rich to read and you didn't have to be rich to write? What if both ends of that spectrum were available at no cost? How much money would it take to run journals, to run the peer review process, to do all the things that we need to do to have quality research publishing processes with all the services therein? Could we do that? And could we do that as a public good, as public infrastructure to support public research knowledge? And their answer was yes, let's go build it. And so the idea of Diamond OA, and I should quick caveat here, the word diamond, I'm not sure that's gonna stick around. Diamond, of course, are related to blood diamonds, the diamonds are related to colonialism and extraction from many countries and so it's not a friendly word in that sense. So a lot of people are starting to move away from talking about diamond and talking instead about community owned and operated. It's a bit longer, we'll see how the phrasing comes out but I just wanted to say this is something that's under discussion. But for right now I'm using the word diamond because next week there's the Diamond Open Access conference in Mexico. And so there's still some name recognition around it. But this is a work in progress. And so Diamond is trying to move toward this idea of community over commercialization. How can we, the non-profit, the academic community, actually take back this space? So they're doing it in several ways. Let me bring these up here. So first, Diamond Open Access doesn't charge subscription fees, doesn't charge article processing charges. In 2021, there was a big study done just asking the question, is anybody doing this? And the answer was, yeah, a lot of people are doing it. There are over 29,000 journals in 2021. There's even more today that are operating on this diamond model. Something like two thirds of them are in Latin America. Why are they in Latin America? Because they didn't, in many cases, the universities and the researchers didn't have the funds to play in the existing commercial models. And so they just built something new. It was very innovative. These tend to be relatively small. They're mic multilingual. They're across all sectors of what we teach in universities, all different disciplines. But Diamond OA is more than just about cost. It's also about governance. And so the idea is that instead of turning over ownership instead of turning over the responsibility of services, of hosting, of data analytics, all these things that research needs and does, we, the community, are gonna build those things. We're gonna build the public infrastructure. We will own it. University presses will operate those things and other nonprofit entities. Both in terms of the content-related elements, but also many of the services that are provided. So why do we need to do this? Well, because over 25 years, commercial publishers have created old gopoles where they have controlled the space. Anybody heard about the company Elsevier? There's been a lot of consolidation of the space where Elsevier and other companies like them have bought up journals. And when you get oligopolies or monopolies, they control the market and they can raise prices and there's not a lot that we can do about it. Except that there is, we control everything. So I'm always careful not to blame Elsevier or Pearson or any of these other companies. None of this is their fault. They are acting as they act as commercial entities. This is our fault. It's our fault when we sign over our copyright. That's our choice. It's our fault when we let our public funds be extracted and go somewhere else. That's something that we have the power to stop. And so a lot of what they're talking about in the Diamond Open Access space is this idea that we need to take back control. Researchers need to stop turning over their copyright. They need to retain their rights and not turn those rights over. We need to retain control of the various content and service related elements. There is, as you might expect, a plan for how are we gonna do all this stuff? It's called the Diamond Action Plan. This is led kind of, it's co-created by Science Europe, Coalition S, big players like Redilik and Latin America and others and they've come together and said, let's work on this globally. Let's not work separately and recreate the wheel. We all have the same problem. We all can get together and talk about a common solution and we need to be coordinated in our efforts because we're simply outgunned when it comes to lobbyists and money and resources and so we must work together. And if we stand in solidarity, sorry, there's a lot of union action happening in the United States. I'm a bit of a solidarity person right now. Yay to the unions. We need more union activity. I lost my train of thought. Now I'm thinking about union negotiations. So next week actually in Toluca, Mexico, many of us will be back on the plane to go back there. There's the second Diamond Open Access Conference. So the point I wanna make here and you can probably see this coming, there is an opportunity to work collectively globally if we truly wanna take back publicly funded knowledge and they're showing us how to do it. They've got a roadmap for how they're gonna actually pull this off. They are acting globally. They're not acting regionally. They're not acting as individual institutions. They're acting globally and they're taking the time to do it. There are supportive recommendations not just from the UNESCO recommendation on open science but also from the European Council itself. Just a couple highlights here. They want zero embargo period as well. Immediate OA, authors shouldn't have to pay APCs. Non-profit scholarly publishing models need to be supported. And it's not just Diamond OA. There's other interesting models out there like Subscribed to Open and others. Rights need to be reserved. Pricing needs to be transparent. All things that we oftentimes don't have when our knowledge is extracted into commercial spaces. There are, I would be remiss if I didn't say the letters AI while I was standing on stage. I know we're all thinking about it. We're wondering what's next. I think this is an interesting opportunity for the open education space as well. We in the OER space, a lot of our work has been in the fat part of the tail where we have the highest enrolled courses. And when you get to the long part of the tail where there's fewer students, we oftentimes don't build OER there because the return on investment just isn't as high. We don't serve as many students. There aren't as many cost savings, et cetera. We don't have as many people to work on sustaining that content over time. I've seen some interesting experiments where we can take, we can ask certain AI devices to help us create OER. It's still in its infancy, but I think it's something we should keep an eye on. There's some interesting work happening at the Khan Academy and other places about this idea of personal AI tutors. It is fraught with controversy. I realize I'm very interested in that. I saw some, we had Anya Kamenetz keynote, the CC summit last week in Mexico, and she showed some research that these tutors are actually just distracting right now in the classroom and aren't very helpful yet. But again, interesting, interesting idea, something for us to keep an eye on in education. I mentioned I was at the Mayo Clinic getting a liver transplant. I just read a Mayo paper the other day about how they had rubrics that they used to use that were human created that helped them make medical decisions about people that had the diseases that I had, and now they're using AI to analyze those. And instead of running a few scenarios, they're having the AI run millions of different scenarios and they actually improved the rubric and got better outcomes as a result just using chat GPT-4 to run some analyses. We've got universal translation, climate solution options, interesting things. I think those are something for us to keep an eye on. I'm particularly worried about the challenges right now. I think now is the moment where regulation is starting to happen, discussions are happening at the highest levels, and we need to be in these conversations today. I think that we need to be looking at public infrastructure just like we need public infrastructure for research and for educational resources. We also need public infrastructure for AI training, data sets for machine learning, for compute power, et cetera. We need to make sure that if we're gonna use AI in education that these AI things are not hallucinating and making up fake citations and none of that, that's just all garbage in, garbage out. How do we make sure that these training sets of AI's training on are not biased today? They're tremendously biased. And we can't look at them and the algorithms are closed as well. And so our ability to critique and analyze and improve and iterate, we don't have access to that today and we must have access to that. And then this last one here, I think goes to the heart of our movement, which is how do we ensure equitable access to AI knowledge analysis, knowledge production for everyone? If you look at the big AI players, they are moving toward paid models. And the question, just like article processing charges on research, will people be cut out because they don't have the money to pay for these services? I'm worried about that and we need to keep an eye on it. I'm not gonna read through this. This is too, way too much text. I'm gonna invite you to go look at it. Out of the Creative Commons summit last week, so I should say our theme for the conference was AI in the Commons. And so we talked a lot about AI and at the end of it we came out with this. This is on the Creative Commons blog. You can find it, but it's seven principles for regulating generative AI to protect the interests of creators, people building in the Commons and society's interests in the sustainability of the Commons. So that was our angle on this. And like I said, there's seven here, I'm not gonna read through them, but I wanna highlight number seven because it pertains to this talk. We said to counterbalance the current concentration of resources in the hands of small number of companies, these measures need to be flanked by public investment, public infrastructure for computational infrastructures that serve the needs of the public interest, users of this technology on a global scale. In addition, there also needs to be public investment in training data sets that respect the principles outlined above. Principles like making sure that people are opting in and their data is not being sucked up without their permission. So if you're interested in this space, I invite you to go take a look at this. Okay, so what do we do now? There's a lot of stuff that's going on, we've got threats, we've got opportunities. What should we do now? I think first and foremost, we need to recognize that we have tremendous power and not just us in this room, but governments that are giving out money have tremendous power and we can fight back without fighting anybody. We just need to change our own behavior and our own actions. And so this is an example, this was an article, I believe, in The Guardian that talked about 40 leading scientists leaving an Elsevier journal. The journal was called Neuroimage. This was like the top journal if you were into neuroimaging of the brain using CT and MRI scans. This is where you wanted to be published. And Elsevier, this journal was incredibly expensive. Elsevier went lower the cost, the APCs were very high and these editors, which really were the people that made the journal quality and high impact in the eyes of promotion tenure committees around the world, they said, no more. We are leaving. They got up and they walked and they went and they created a brand new open access journal and they said, we're taking our expertise and our reputation and we're going over here and don't publish there anymore and they put out a memo to the entire neuroscience community and they said, this is what we did and you should think about doing the same. That was within their power to do so. They didn't have to fight Elsevier. They sent Elsevier a memo that said, we're leaving. Good luck. We can fight back with the policies that we put on the money. At CC we often refer to this as shifting the money to open. So if you require that publicly funded knowledge is opened by default, guess what? It's opened by default. If it's educational resources funded, you have OER. If it's research that's funded, you have open access research. If it's data, you've got open data. We have to have policies that require that things be open when they're funded with public funds. If anybody needs help doing this, give me a call, we'll get you the resources, we'll help you do it. We can also do it, so that's a very top down, right? If you take our money, you're gonna open up what you build because it's public funds. This is a bottom up approach. So I'll pick on Rajiv again. Rajiv is at Brock University, he's got a budget. He can make decisions about how he spends his budget, including how they procure materials, resources, data, educational resources, et cetera. And so he has an opportunity at a local level, even if there isn't an open policy in his province, he can build and buy and commission what he needs done. He can ensure that he keeps the copyright or Brock University keeps the copyright or the authors that are doing the work at Brock University keep the copyright and then they can choose if they want to to share and openly license. Put this in shorthand, it's buy what you need, own what you buy and share what you own, right? We can do that locally. I've talked, I just talked with our, as you can imagine, I'm all kinds of fun at parent teacher conferences. I always wear my CC shirt and I ask them, are using OER and my kids are just like, oh my God, dad, please stop. But we, I asked them this, I said, you know how much? So we live in Olympia, Washington and they have a 500,000 USD budget every year for curriculum acquisition and procurement. We've got about 100 cells on the Excel sheet. We've got about eight subjects per grade. We've got 12 grades, that's 96 cells. With our 500,000 dollars a year, guess how many of those cells they can update? Two a year, right? So my kids had political science textbooks in high school that are copyrighted in 1998. Has anything interested happened in political science since 1998? Just a few things, right? We need to build the infrastructure, the public infrastructure that we need to make the knowledge open and to solve the world's biggest problems. This is a project that Creative Commons and Open Futures and others are working with, with NORAD in Norway right now and we're building a stack of open source software services to serve up open climate data. So I mentioned the Climate Data Project we have at CC where we're helping the world's largest climate data sets open up and be more open. We're gonna take API feeds and we're gonna jam them into this open source software stack just like Norway has its seed bank. This is like an open climate data bank and not only will you be able to go there, one stop shopping for all the open climate data you might need at no cost, all open, but you'll also be able to get services. So if your province or your country wants to create apps to help people have smaller carbon footprints, for example, you don't have to recreate the wheel, you don't have to build the infrastructure. Norway is gonna fund the infrastructure to make that simple and easy. We're calling this the Open Earth Platform Initiative. It's public infrastructure for public knowledge. I mentioned REDALIC, this is an organization in Latin America that is providing infrastructure, the entire stack of infrastructure and services that are needed to support diamond open access journals. Heavily used across Latin America and increasingly used across Europe and the United States and other countries as well. So much so that they're getting into conversations about, hey, Europe, you seem to be using our platform a lot, can you kick in some funds to help? Sustainability. My colleague at REDALIC, her name is Ariana Garcia, she's amazing if you haven't seen her speak. She says the same thing that I say, this is up to us, this is our choice, we have the power and this is one of her slides from last week. She said, look, we got two choices. Science can be a commodity that gets extracted, goes to commercial interests, gets sold back to us and science will be embargoed. Science will be controlled by commercial companies. Science will be APC based. You're gonna have to turn your copyright over. That's what we've been doing or science can be a public good and we can have immediate open access. We can have epistemic justice. I love that phrase that she uses. We can make sure that these are equitable. Everybody in the world can both read and can participate in writing because science is not just for a few countries, science is for everyone. So that's what Diamond Open Access is working on. They're building public infrastructure. What would Diamond Open Education look like or community owned and operated education? Can we do the same thing? Can we also have a global conversation and be coordinated around these ideas? Can we go to our national governments and say, hey, you signed on to the UNESCO recommendation on OER. It says publicly funded educational resources should be opened by default. Can we work with them to enact those policies? And then can we also ask those governments to fund the infrastructure or support existing open infrastructure to host all of that? I think we can and I've been talking to a lot of folks that are interested in putting together such a coalition. So can we build a coalition both inside the open education community and outside? I was talking last week with some folks who said, you know, we need to partner up with labor unions. They know how to do this better than we do and particularly teacher and education unions because this is a point that they care about. How do we both plan for the future and figure out, like Diamond Access says, what's the stack of services we need, just like you saw with Redalick, but also how do we fight what we oftentimes refer to as a rear guard action? Because the publishers are not stopping. The commercial entities are coming to your universities all around the world and they're trying to sign these three to five year deals where the cost of educational materials gets jammed into tuition and it makes OER or any other open activities very difficult at your institutions. We have to expose that. We have to try to stop that. We have to educate our faculty and our administrators. We need to make sure that we don't let that get too entrenched because as we build the plan for the future, we don't want to leave behind universities that are stuck in these long-term contracts. The theme of this is sustainability. People always say, geez, how are we gonna pay for this? In my opinion, the answer is very simple. We need to find open knowledge as a public good. There's, I get hit every time I say this, but I'll say it anyway. There's oftentimes enough money in the system. We're just really bad at how we spend it. In the United States alone, just for K-12, we spend between six and nine billion US dollars a year procuring educational resources. In higher education, it's closer to nine to 10 billion US dollars a year. How much money would we need to build open educational resources for all subjects, all grades? Is it more than 20 billion dollars? My guess is probably not, right? But those are choices that we can make. I've already said that, I'm gonna skip. So final slides here. This is not easy, right? It's easy for me to stand up here and talk about it, but I realize this is really hard work. What I put to you is that we no longer have a choice, the open access community got to a point where frankly they just said, this is untenable. We have article processing charges getting entrenched systematically and we are not going to beat the commercial entities on this fight. We're simply outgunned. And so we need to take the tablecloth and pull it off the table and have a clean table and we're gonna build a different model that has different principles where we own everything, we run everything and if we need the commercial entities we will use them, but they will be worked for hire. As I said, out of the gates, we need public knowledge in order to solve the world's most pressing problems. If the knowledge about climate change, if the knowledge about education, if the knowledge about gender inequality, poverty, life on land, life below water, pick your favorite SDG. If those are locked up behind paywalls we don't get to solve the SDGs. And last, it's our job to ensure that publicly funded knowledge is a public good accessible to everybody, not just the rich. I put to you, we should work together to solve big problems. There are plenty of them in the world. Let's start working on this. Thank you very much. I think we have time for a couple of questions. Yes, please. Thanks so much, Cable. I think you may have given us a theme for next year's OE Global Conference, perhaps. I was wondering if you might suggest for people who are really energized by what you're talking about here, anything that's coming up in the next few months that we might direct our attention to how to engage in any particular aspects of the work that you've laid out here. Yeah, that's a good question. Well, if you're free next week, come to the Diamond Open Access Conference in Toluca, Mexico, it's gonna be great. So that's what's on my brain right now is the next week. There are always opportunities to get involved with the open climate campaign, of course, but Kurt, I think the honest answer to your question is that we today in the open education space, I don't think we have a good answer to that question, like they do in the Diamond Open Access space. If you ask that question in the Diamond Open OE Conference, they would say, here are five ways to get involved right now. And I think that's a conversation that we need to have, is are we ready to act collectively to actually start to, starting with a plan. So they have a Diamond Open Access plan that plots out the next 10 years and what needs to be done. Can we do the same thing in the open education space? It's not easy, right? And there's gonna be a lot of disagreement and a lot of drafts that get written, but I think that's the direction we need to have so that when questions like that get asked, we actually have on-ramps for people. One of my favorite organizations in this space is Mozilla for projects that they run. They oftentimes put out a short pamphlet that says, if you are looking for a job, here's what you can do. If you're looking to volunteer five hours a week, here's what you can do. If you only have 30 minutes a week, here's something that you can do. And they find ways, if you're a graduate student, here's how you can get involved. And so I think we need to get a bit more organized so that I can give you a better answer. That's actually what I think. Hi, Cable, it's nice to see you. Cable, I have kind of a tough question. So when we talk about our community and we have a great large community here and we have a lot of organizations, large organizations like Creative Commons, they get the lion's share of the funding for open. Small organizations, small people, small nations do not. And so I'm wondering if there's a way, as a big community, we can start to solve that. Can we mentor, can we train for leadership and asking for funds? You're super good at it. If you walk to a government representative in the US, you get listened to. For those of us who don't have that connect, it's much harder. But there's so many great ideas, so many grassroots ideas, certainly the diamond publishing, everybody needs to be paid for their work appropriately, right? So how can we, as a community, find ways to talk about how we get funding and train folks to get more funding? Great question. I would say there's... Yes, thank you. I think there's two important answers to that. First is that we have to have the funders at the table as we're having these big conversations. So for example, next week in Toluca, Mexico, the big open access funders are all there. The Gates Foundation will be there, Arcadia will be there, and many others that fund in the research space. The big scientific institutes will be there, and several governments will be there as well. Because as the plan was being written for Diamond Open Access, part of what was implied in that is we need you, the funders, to fund along this plan and not off the plan. And that was also a change for the funders. The funders were used to a model where they talked with their grantees, and grantees would say, hey, I've got this idea of this thing that I wanna go do, and the funder would fund it, and it was a bit of a thousand flowers blooming, but not a lot of coordinated direction. And so the funders really have, in the open access space, have really adjusted their framework to talk about funding along that line. And so when it comes to smaller organizations, individuals, what I think they've done well in the open access space is provided a way for everyone to be involved, and because the funding is starting to align along that plan, there's just so much work that needs to be done in different parts of the plan. There's spaces for people to plug in, and because the funders are committed to fund the plan, it's more likely that more entities receive funding. I think that's part of the answer. I think another part of the answer is when you go in coalition, it's easier to participate both with ideas and to receive resources and funding if you're part of the group that's acting in concert against a common plan. And I've seen some of that happen. We had several people at the CC summit who were independent consultants who were attached to several of these larger projects, and that was how they were getting involved because there was a long-term plan. I hope that's helpful. Last one. One more question, yeah, please. Okay, hi, Cable. I'm just wondering, all of this at the macro level sounds great because we're building a system that makes the previous system obsolete. However, if we take it down to the individual, where often those of us who are working in open education are a single person or part of maybe a two-person team on the ground, and we've got the situation where publishers are, they have their trusted relationships with individual academics, they're short-cutting a lot of the systems by striking deals with individual academics. They've got access in that way. From if we're looking at this as being quite overwhelming from an individual perspective, what are some of the practical things that an individual can do at their institution to start to make these changes? Good question, right? This comes up all the time. I think there's two answers to that. The first thing is that all of us collectively have a responsibility to locate, identify, and start to solve pain points that make it hard for people to be open. So for example, one of the things they're talking a lot about in the Diamond Open Access space is, hey, I'm a researcher, I'm just trying to get promotion and tenure so that I can become a tenured faculty member. I have to publish in six reputable journals and my promotion tenure committee defines reputable as this set of commercial journals. And I wanna publish over here in Open Access, but if I do, I'm worried I'm not gonna get promotion tenure. That's a pain point, right? And part of our job is to go to those deans and those department chairs and go to those promotion tenure committees through a variety of channels and say to them, you need to support your faculty because part of it is the first half of my slides, right? Knowledge should be a public good. What you are incenting, and in fact, requiring of your faculty is for them to publish in closed spaces where A, they're not gonna be read as much. B, anybody who can't afford the expensive subscription rates or maybe your faculty member can't afford the expensive APC fee to even get published in the first place. So why, we have to educate them about how the existing models are harmful and why they need to change their promotion and tenure rule. So part of it is identifying pain points. Another part of it is helping the individual actor, the individual faculty member, the educator, the researcher to realize there are some things that they can do on their own. So for example, with researchers, we say stop turning your copyright over. Here's an author's addendum that you can use from Authors Alliance or from Spark. There's several of them out there where you say to the publisher, yes, I will publish with you, but I will not give you my copyright. And if you have a problem with that, I'll go publish somewhere else. And more often than not, they'll take it. And then they can put it in green open access in their institutional repository and put an open license on it and share it. We can do the same thing with our educational resources, right? As an act of self power, we can openly license and we can share if we choose to do so. So there are things that we can do as individuals to continue to contribute to the commons and use from the commons that will send signals to our colleagues. And then there are also things that we have to do at a higher level to essentially clear the pathway. We need to get these barriers out of the way so that sharing is easy. For example, with the open climate campaign, we're actually, we've hired OAWirks to provide direct support services to researchers who want to open up their climate research and might have questions about how to do that. Like we need to clear those pathways to make sharing easy. Great. Dr. Green, thank you so much for your wonderful keynote address. It was very inspiring. And I'm sure there'll be a lot of discussion about this in the next couple of days. And as a token of appreciation, we would like to present you with this gift on behalf of Norquest and the OE Global. Thank you so much. Beautiful. Thank you very much. Thank you so much.