 Good afternoon everyone, and this is a research study I did with Nian Sheng, and we presented preliminary results at the previous open ed conference in Barcelona last year, and we replicated the study one year later to make it more robust and also in the hope that there would be some more positive results regarding the use of the open access press, but nevertheless the results are positive in any case. Just to give you some background, AU Press is Canada's first open access university press, and I think it's now been followed by the University of Ottawa. All the publications are peer reviewed, so it's a very stringent quality control mechanism, and so far our books have won at least eight or nine awards either locally or internationally, and we just won a major international award for head smashed in Buffalo, and I'll be talking about that. We do books, monographs, and we also publish journals, the Erode, the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, the Canadian distance education journal, et cetera. We look at innovative and experimental works, so there's some really strange and weird poetry works out there if you ever want to take a look at them. Diaries of pioneers in Western Canada, oral histories, et cetera, the women's oral histories in early Alberta, things like that, and eLearning. We have a series that's edited by Terry Anderson on eLearning. That gives you an idea of some of the books that have been coming out, and this is the one with the major awards that we mentioned is an imagining head smashed in. It just won the Felicia Holden Book Award for Architecture Institute of America, and it's won in awards from the American Archaeology Society, the Alberta Book Publishing Award and the Edmonton Book Prize. So that's just one example of the quality of the works that are there. And these three, ETECS, the Terry Anderson's Theory and Practice of Online Learning, Muhammad Ali's Mobile Learning, and Dietmar Kenepol and Lawton's Teaching Science Online at a distance. These are all one of the Wettemeyer awards from the University Continuing Education Association in the U.S. as the best distance education books. Scholarly journals, there's a Rodel, there's the Canadian Journal of Learning Technology, the Journal of Distance Education, are all published by AU Press. We have a strategic partnership with PKP, the Public Knowledge Project, which is an open source book editor reviewing system, which we actually have contributed quite a bit to that project. And we're part of the lowest level campus, Alberta Digital Library, where they're creating a digital library for use by all the education institutions in the province. We use the Creative Commons by non-commercial and non-derivatives license. And the reason for that is to give an example is because it's non-commercial. We just made a deal for translation of a number of these books with China, and it helps us to subsidize the press and help to pay our way, and particularly for the print books. So we use the Creative Commons license, the restricted one that I say there. And again, it's basically we sell the print books. And that's what I'm talking about today is we have, sorry, yes. I had a question. The non-commercial you said made it easier to exchange this internationally, but what's the thinking behind the non-derivative? Because these, for example, it's a poetry book. The poets don't want you to touch it, like leave it as it is. And that's the standard license. Some of the books don't have the non-derivative, and they're like the text books, the ones that are used as text. But a lot of the, like novels, and biographies. So it's a topic and context specific. Just as we all know, non-derivative makes it tough. Yes, it does. And of course the non-commercial is so as we can sell it ourselves, so nobody else can sell it. China wouldn't pay us for it if we didn't have a non-commercial license on them. So yeah, attribution, non-commercial, and non-derivatives. So what we did was we wanted to see how did the sales of our print books compare with the sale of print books from traditional university presses? The traditional presses don't do digital books. So we surmised that there wouldn't be any difference between the sales of print books that are openly available in the digital format and the print books that are produced by the traditional presses. And you cannot get the information. They will not, the other presses would not give us the information on their sales. So we don't know what their actual sales were, and we don't know what their sales were, the libraries, so we can't compare them. But what we could do is look at their ranking on Amazon, and for every book on Amazon there's a ranking. And the lower the number, the more the sales. And two people have done an estimate of what the rankings mean, and they're quite similar. So I think with a reasonable degree of confidence we can say that that's what the ranking means. So if it's between one and ten, you're selling about 3,000 copies a day, or greater than a thousand copies per week. And it goes down the line, all the different rankings. So if you're two million, you're selling one copy every three or four years. So it gives you a, it's a reasonable, if not exactly accurate measure, of what their sales are, at least on Amazon. So most scholarly books are greater than 100,000. They move comparatively little light in that they're, whatever their ranges. They decay relatively slowly. They're rough estimates, and they don't give stats for what the Kindle book sales are. So the methodology we used was a stratified random sampling. We used publications from 2008 to 2010. It was a limited sample because AU Press had just got off the ground, and they didn't have that many books. So we couldn't do a really huge sampling. So we did AU Press and three other presses, eleven books each, three samplings separated by three months in the original one, and then we waited a year and did it again. And the comparison groups was the University of Alberta Press, University of Calgary Press, and the University of Toronto Press. And these three are very prestigious, and probably they're among the largest university presses in Canada. So our prediction was the null hypothesis that there'd be no significant difference in sales of print books, that the rank of the open press would be equal to the rank of the traditional presses at a 5% level of significance. We made the alternative hypothesis that there is a difference, that the rank of open press is not equal to the rank of the traditional research presses. And so we did an analysis, and we came up and the result was there. We did it three times, once separated by three months, and then again by a year, and then every time there was no significant difference. So the conclusion from that is, is by opening up your books and putting them, making them freely available online, it will not negatively affect your sales of print books. And in this particular situation, I think the ability to generalize it is sort of limited, but at least in this one case, using Amazon as a measure, that was the case. The print books, we can say that print books did not suffer in sales because they were also available digitally online. And by the way, I should have mentioned, we did it on both Amazon Canada and Amazon.com in the United States. So we tested both, and in both there was no significant difference. And as you can imagine, most of the Canadian books did much better on Amazon CA than Amazon.com. But having said that, the other presses, you can't download the books. The AU Press books were downloaded by more than 80,000 people. There were more than 80,000 downloads of different chapters or parts of books, and the full books, there were 20,000 downloads. An average of 6,000 per book and an average of full books about 2,000. So what we can say is you can exponentially increase your readership by having it available digitally online for free and again without penalizing your book sales. Sir, a little puzzled by your dates at the top. It says six months, but is that August of 2009? August 2009 to January of 11, yeah. Is that closer to 18 months? Yes it is, yeah, sorry, it's 18 months. So that gives you the results of the studies that we've done and again, as I said, we reported on it after the three months and now it's after 18 months. And we'll probably do it one more time to see. But the basic message is don't worry about opening up your books and another benefit that we're looking into that we couldn't early on but I think at this point we can, it may take another five years to really look at it, is the number of citations of your books and we find that if it's online and available, your citation rate goes through the roof and in comparison to traditional books and journals, if it's only available in print, yes. How many university presses in the U.S. are making an open source these days? I don't think the same. What are the ones in Canada? The only other one is the University of Ottawa Press, as we know it. And to be honest, I don't know if there's any in Europe either. I think that the Springer has something that is sort of open. Yes. Is anyone talking with publicity and people are trying to get questions to let them know about these? Oh yeah, we've let them know about these results because we have partnerships with these presses. Some of our books are also sold by other presses. So they know this, but it's their traditional publishing mentality and they have to change it. In fact, when we set up a U Press, we had a huge battle to make it open. Our president who came in at the time who set it up, we wanted a university press. He was really, this was his baby. But we fought with him to make it open. He didn't believe in it. But now he's a big believer that he goes about the world bragging about it. And the director of our AU Press, he's invited all over the world to talk about it because it's so revolutionary. And again, at the beginning, he didn't want anything to do with it being open. They wanted a traditional press. There were enough of us in the university, thank God, but we pushed them and they finally relented and said, okay, if that makes you happy, we'll do it. And it's working very well. The University of Florida is also doing open press through their four to distance learning consortium. It's a partnership between them and the University of Florida. And they're publishing some open textbooks through that. There's three or four coming out this year. So there are other presses. I'm not sure if they're completely open, but they have the Orange Grove open textbook site. So there are some other, which is a good point. But most of them are, as you say, are for textbooks. These are only incidentally textbooks. They're scholarly words that are being used as textbooks. So the University of Florida has those as well. Because their press has been around for a long time. And I believe they are opening those up as well. I'm surprised they don't, they don't catch on. I mean, the average scholarly article is read by six people. You open it up online and the average is up in the hundreds. I mean, it makes that much of a difference. And sometimes the thousands, I mean, it just, the graphs are really low and then suddenly you put it online. And I just saw there was a report out about a press in England who last year opened it up and they showed their readership and citations and they were all really low. And then suddenly they opened it up and it was, it hit the roof. It made such a positive difference for them. And let's face it, for academics, I mean, you want it to be read and signed. That's more important than you're never going to make money on it. I work with the Public Knowledge Project at Europe. And one of the things that we've really seen in the journal publishing is a lot more open access journal publishing. And we've seen a lot of scholars and academic libraries almost doing hand runs around the traditional presses to get their work out and make it open. I think that we're going to start to see that happening in the area of monographs as well where if the traditional university presses don't start to learn from your example we're going to see those similar hand runs where scholars are going to self-publish or collaborate with their university library who provide them with the technological services. So it's a critical time, I think, for a university press. And I agree with that strategy. I mean, you can't fight the copyright gurus head on. You're best to just ignore them. Go to OER, let them have all their digital rights management, let them put it on. I know one thing at our university, the major things that are making our faculty move very quickly towards OER is, number one, they're bringing in very strict, made in the U.S., copyright laws in Canada with very strict measures of digital rights management which will effectively take away all of our fair dealing rights. We won't have any. And number two, they're bringing in a copyright collective where we used to pay $3.50 to make course packs and now they want $45 per full-time equivalent student. And no matter, even if our university had 100% open education resources, we'd have to still pay the $45 when another university used only proprietary material. And so they say, you have to pay the same rate. And to us and to our faculty, they're beginning to see this as just crazy. And the really big thing is our faculty are beginning to get into with their students and to work on tablets. So our students, our course material is all online. They use tablets. And what we're finding with proprietary material, you can't copy, you can't paste, you can't highlight, you're not allowed to print it out or they actually limit you to print out five pages once. You can't shift it from one computer to the other. Never mind format shifting. Even in the same format, they won't let you do it. And then they have the dead date where they just go into your computer and take it out. And all of these things that I think people think, we can't work under those. Educators can't work with that kind of material. I mean, the other thing is if you show your textbook to your wife or to anyone, you must immediately delete it from your tablet and notify them. And if you've clicked on that little license, you have agreed to do that. And you've also, by clicking on that license, also agreed that you have no fair use or fair dealing rights. So with all those things together, what it means is that we just can't work with that material. If it's proprietary, it can't work. So we're trying to, we're pushing in our university now before you do any course creation, you go to OER and you do a search on OER. I mean, what a revolutionary idea for academics is before doing anything, do a search for what's out there. You know, we train all our graduate students to do that and they don't do it for their courses. So we're getting there, yes. There are certain types of authors that you find are more apt to do this kind of work, or people pretty, anyone's pretty open to it. I think it's just about any of these, these are scholarly books. Nobody really expects to make that money out of it. So they just would love to get it published by a university press, which has been, and it's been peer reviewed. Also, there's somebody out there that said, yes, this is a worthy contribution to knowledge. Rick, you talk a little bit about one of your press's books, like Vagina and Smash, I'm just going to give you an example of how that one played out both online open access and sales in the print form. It seems like a really intriguing book that would have a much larger audience than your average scholarly audience. Yes, some of them are way up there. They're in the lower than 100,000 rankings. We haven't had any lower than 50,000, but neither did any of the traditional presses either. But one of them, that one's there, and the other big seller is Bomb Canada. It's called Views of Canada in the United States. They view them in the whole book. It's quite funny actually. So it's a major seller in Canada. So both of those books are two of your top sellers. Yeah, and the other two are Sherry Anderson's book because it's used as a textbook. And it's been translated into Chinese as has Muhammad Ali's book on mobile learning. They're huge sellers as well. And people, I don't understand it myself, mobile learning. Why don't you download it and put it on your mobile device? But no, they want the paper. I thought it was a big surprise to me. I scratched my head why anyone would buy a print copy of that. It's a huge seller. I was going to ask if you have any sense of different, like what kinds of people are buying these print books and what kinds of people are downloading it. It doesn't seem like maybe from the way you say it a little bit, you may be able to tell, but that would be kind of interesting at least for people. We didn't tell it. Just from my own feelings about it is the older people buy the book. The younger people put it on their tablet. That's what I'm thinking. But there's a lot of older people going to tablets now, so I wouldn't, you know, I'd say the research may contradict me completely. But just in my experience, people have been brought up with books and people are brought up now with tablets. There's going to be a big change. But I'm surprised how many older people, once they've tried, we have the biggest, I want pipe. I want everything on pipe. One of our instructors caught me and he got a tablet. He's got a different opinion on it now. He's not so sure. I think that's what did it, was the iPad. We were struggling to get people really thinking and interested. I had meetings, because we've been pushing mobile learning for ten years. Mobile learning who wants to learn on a mobile device. You know, that's nonsense. Nobody's going to do that. And the tablet comes out and now the whole atmosphere has changed. And in fact, I believe that most of us will be, at least in the developing country, developed countries, will be learning on mobile devices. And it will probably be the tablet. Yeah, because you could make the font work. I like it real late. But the other thing is Elton Corsair Consortium is going to present some statistics later on today about who your users are. And it turns out in the United States, I'm going to pick the number one, but it's something like 30 or 40% of the people are 40 now who use Elton Corsair in the United States. It's different internationally. So don't count the old folks out yet. You're still learning. No, but again, a lot of these, as I mentioned, the problems with e-books. I mean, it's a huge problem for education, but it's still even a problem for people who buy one. I mean, I just got a Mac Air and I transferred an e-book that I bought over to my Mac Air and iTunes took it off me. I said, you don't have the legal right to use this. I had every legal right to do that. And they took it off me. I had to contact outofold.com. And I got a number that gave me some secret code word. I gave it to Apple and now it's back on. But I don't want to do that. Why should I have to do that? Why should I have to prove it? And, you know, why did they have the right to go into my computer and take information away from me? I mean, this is... I think that the model has to change in some way. And you don't buy it. And I think they're suing Amazon now for saying that you buy the book. Well, if it's a digital book, you don't buy it. You license it. And you license it under conditions that they have no rights to guarantee anything. They have no responsibility or liability whatsoever. They have no cage-turbo agreements that you have to click to. And who reads that? I do. I've read quite a few of them. You do not sell your soul to the company. It's not that far. But one company did do that last April first. They put it in their license and everybody was clicking on it. But we have your immortal soul. I work in the K-12 sector here in Utah. And we have a couple of our high schools. Some really large, at-risk high schools that are using all digital tablets. We actually have iPads in one school and iPods in another school. iPod touches in another school. One of the things we're struggling with... We're finding a lot of e-books, but they're just text in nature. And kids are more... They are more likely to read those that are interactive. So what do you see in terms of the university level? The e-books being published that are highly interactive. The latest one I saw was Al Gore's book where you can actually touch the wind turbine. You can learn about it touchfully and then you touch it and you can actually see graphic representation and you can see it, the movement and the energy levels and do all of this stuff that's really amazing. Those are the kinds of things that in K-12 we're trying to gravitate to from a cost-aid perspective, but just cognitively it's a better form of learning. What do you see from the university level of higher ed of moving towards interactive touch? Well, we certainly are. We're in the process now of going through... We have about 200 interactive demos in different courses. Little flash or Java's applications that demonstrate different points interactively. And we're in the process of going through them now and improving them and getting them ready because we're going to put them on our own CWC site and make them available. So you're seeing that grow exponentially? Yeah, I see where the beginning stages of it. I think publishers are going to come up with these great books and it's a shame you can't use them because of all their restrictive licensing so it's up to us to start creating them. But they say, well, where's the sustainability model? The sustainability model is we don't have one for the way it is now. Our problems pay $78 million a year for a textbook, for a school. But we could create all of them by the full rights copyright everything for every single book in textbooks, make it interactive for less than $78 million and do it once and then we can update it all the time for $5 or $10 million a year. And I don't know why the politicians don't see it. They're beginning to ask though because they realize that the present situation is unsustainable. Florida's doing big things, Washington State, Texas. I heard Indiana just recently in California. So they're starting to think about it and get on with it, but that's where it's going.