 I think it's time to get started. Welcome everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Cliff Lynch, the director of the Coalition for Networked Information, and you've joined one of the project briefing sessions at the CNI Spring 2020 virtual meeting, which will run through the end of this month. I note, by the way, that we have just announced a couple of additional sessions for the spring meeting, and that announcement went out earlier today to everybody who's registered, so please join us for those. Today we have a really interesting presentation, which I'll introduce in just a second. After the presentation, we will take questions, and Diane Goldenberghardt from CNI will moderate those questions. There is a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen, and you can use that at any point during the presentation to put in questions as they occur to you, and we'll deal with them all at the end of the presentation, but certainly don't hesitate to pose them as they arise. So our talk today is about crowdsourced unlatching of curricular books. Our speaker is Mark Bilby, who is from Cal State Fullerton, and I'm really interested to hear this presentation because while I've watched the work of Knowledge Unlatched for some years, and it's a wonderful thing, I've also worried that it's not at enough scale to really move the needle. The project here, at least as I understand it, couples the strategy of knowledge unlatched with a strategic approach to identify materials of high impact and advance a number of worthy objectives at once, so I'm really delighted that Mark has agreed to share this work with us, and without further ado, over to you, Mark. Thank you very much, Cliff. I appreciate that, and thank you, Diane, for all your work in organizing these sessions and keeping them running smoothly. Can everybody see my screen all right? I just want to make sure that that's visible to everyone. Yep, we can see it. Perfect. Thank you, Diane. All right. All right, well, I'll get started. The page for this project on the CNI website has the full abstract. It has a link to this presentation outline via its DOI. It's been archived on Zenodo for everybody to be able to access. So this is just typically how I present. I like working with one-page handouts that are kind of information dense, and then unpacking them. So start out with just an environmental scan or analysis about what's going on in the publishing world, especially in regard to textbooks. You know, long gone are the days it feels like when librarians were concerned about putting copyright violation warning signs on copy machines in libraries for fear that students would scan books and share them out. Now everybody's got a high-powered, high-volume, high-resolution scanner in their pocket and a variety of apps available to them that can compile those scans very quickly into usable PDFs and share them out with their fellow students. So, you know, we obviously live in a culture where there's an expectation of instant access where people are comfortable, students are comfortable requesting and sharing materials with each other, even on Twitter with the ICANN has PDF hashtag. There's an expectation of on-demand use. And then there's also, I think, a culture, increasingly culture of course shuffling, you might say, at the start of the semester where students, because of bottlenecks with registration or just kind of almost sampling courses before they commit, there's a lot of turnover and transitions in those first few weeks of a course. So, all that adds to, is part of the environment in which we should consider what's going on and the importance of reliable open textbook delivery. In terms of broad economic trends, people who, you know, looked at this and studied this, especially in the open educational resources community over the last 30 years have noted that textbook inflation is really egregious that it far surpasses even health care inflation. Five to seven percent inflation rates are pretty typical year over year. And then the really negative part of that as well, you know, in the United States, bankruptcy can be a way of alleviating health care costs and debts and so on with student loan debts. Those are not something that can be forgiven. So, students are racking up textbook bills, $10,000, you know, potentially in a given program, and then aren't able to ever get out from under that. So, it's also part of this broader culture of debt and exploitation of students. What's going on? In terms of content models, textbooks are becoming increasingly interactive, immersive and value added. We're seeing more curricular support, you know, development of lesson plans, the availability of grading services, lectures delivered with the book, you know, whether, you know, it used to be through CDs, but now through online platforms, which often cost more money for students to access and use. So, we're getting beyond just the print textbook to old bevy of services. And this is also filtering into pricing models. So, vendors are more and more now lending materials and asking for subscriptions, not just from libraries, but from individuals. So, now students are being inundated, you know, when they go to Amazon, for instance, with lending options to just check out, not really even check out, but, you know, borrow a textbook, you might say, for just a few months, a month for the duration of the semester or a year, only to return it. So, licenses are becoming many ways more restrictive in terms of the rights that they give to students. Textbooks are being re-envisioned as a service, almost like softwares service, now it's books as a service. And that model is really encroaching on the traditional models of purchasing textbooks or even open access subsidizing textbooks through book processing charges. You know, it's almost as if, you know, libraries, which were the lenders before, now are being replaced in some ways by Amazon and other companies that are getting into the book borrowing business. Analytics, there's certainly a ton of information out there and universities and the University Consortia and booksellers and vendors are aggregating information all the time, but this isn't, at least from most universities, it's not being done openly or effectively. The open syllabus project is one of the exceptions to that by gathering hundreds of thousands of syllabi and that's scraping the data to see what textbooks are being offered. Purchasers are really being divided and conquered by textbook publishers. So students and parents and universities and funders really aren't talking to each other, they aren't coordinating with each other in order to bargain collectively or strategically. So and with the virtual monopoly that exists in the textbook industry, you know, the consumer is really at a severe disadvantage unless we all work together, you know, for the common good. There are more and more, as we know, born open textbooks or open textbooks from the start, not a whole bunch. Most open books are in the monograph space, the research monograph space, not necessarily in textbook space, but of course there are organizations like OpenStacks and Open Textbook Network that do focus sometimes on textbooks or often on textbooks in the case of OpenStacks, but as people who work in open educational resources space know getting faculty to adopt them is pretty difficult even when there's formal training or incentives put in place. So the idea here is it's kind of like what Cliff was saying about knowledge and latched having this model that had been worked out of flipping a textbook or unlatching or unlocking it, basically re-licensing a book that has already been done and knowledge and latched has been doing that for many years now, but thinking about that at scale, not just for research monographs or other kinds of scholarly publications, but thinking about it for materials that would be especially valuable to students in their courses, required textbooks and so on. So, you know, we can call this any number of things on lashing a book, but I also like the idea of sort of adopting a book or rescuing a book or liberating a book, a textbook, and I really just like to propose this as a model, as a new way of thinking about, you know, publishing instead of creating new content or just being subject to publisher terms about content, redefining what this content could be through negotiation and then re-licensing with the Creative Commons license. So we tried to think about how a pilot could work and these are conversations that I had with Sven Fund from Knowledge and Latched CEO, as well as Chris Friedland, the director of the Open Library at the Internet Archive and Matt also from the Open Library. And so as we thought together about what a pilot might look like, we tried to focus on books where there's low revenue potential for publishers, publishers, books on which publishers were not making money, on which authors were not making money, so no minimal royalty impacts, these sorts of things. We also wanted to look at books that were limited in their availability, so rare out of print or unlikely to get a new print run, so just kind of sitting there in the back lists for publishers. Also books that are print-only format, so what books that are being assigned in courses that are only available in print that aren't yet available digitally, not yet digitized, or if they are digitized, maybe it's only in the Open Library. And then we wanted to find books that would have a broad impact that were being used across multiple courses or multiple sections of a course and preferentially across multiple universities at the same time. And as we looked at this model, there's going to be winners and losers, but overall it seems like more winners than losers. The library we feel like would benefit from this as an expense where not only could we say we were serving our own students well and saving the money, but saving students globally by re-licensing a book. We're not only benefiting our university 40,000 students, we're benefiting 7 billion students potentially globally. So the scale of that, the scale of the benefit is astronomically higher. Happy students, students would be very happy with the results of this. Publishers should be pretty happy with this, especially these are backlisted titles where publishers are not making any money because it gives them a new revenue source. And it would be quick and easy, just writing a check basically for a few thousand dollars. It could be more for a given book, but probably wouldn't be a one-at-a-time thing. And we'll get into that as we try to work out the details of the pilot. The only people I think that would really be at a disadvantage in this, if this model really got going, would be the reselling market, folks who buy up textbooks at the end of semesters and resell them to students and are making margins on that. So that sort of, it's not recycling really, but that reselling industry might be negatively impacted by this. But overall I think society would win and most of the people that whose interests we should be protecting would be winning in this scenario. So the pilot, and really this was just an idea, this was a proposal. So I'll review more of that later, but with this pilot proposal, what we decided to put together was first coming out of the Cal State system. So the Cal State University system has had for many years a very robust program going on in affordable learning solutions and open educational resources, pretty well known for the Merlot platform of hosting open educational resources. There's also significant grant funds that come out of our chancellor's office given to all 23 campuses to encourage faculty to adopt open educational materials. There's been a lot of legislation in the state of California that has really moved the ball on this where courses, for instance, are marked with a little asterisk in the catalog or in the registration system. If those courses have free zero cost materials, we've had whole programs move over to zero cost. Our instructional design program, for instance, if Fullerton has done that and other Cal State's whole degree programs have moved over to zero cost where they've made that commitment together. But still the scalability of this is pretty difficult. So we tried to leverage the power of the system across these 23 universities, representing 50,000 faculty, half million students, and see if we can find some good candidates among these. So fortunately, we have system-wide efforts already in this space. And George Wren in our system, I think he's at Humboldt, had already compiled a list of 18,000 ISBNs. And so George was kind to provide that to me to be able to share out with other people. So we basically provided this list of ISBNs to Knowledge and Latched. They did a thorough evaluation of the list. And the list wasn't just pure ISBNs, it was also which campus those books were being used on which courses, how many sections were represented, all of this sort of thing. So it was kind of a deeper picture of how these textbooks are being used. So Knowledge and Latched then evaluated the list to try to find that sweet spot of books that probably wouldn't be too high in price, but would be advantageous for multiple campuses. And they also wanted to take a bulk relicensing approach to the negotiations. This is from Spenfoom to Knowledge and Latched. He was noting that publishers typically don't want to negotiate one book at a time. It's just a waste of their time. It's too small. So really, we needed a kind of a book package to look at, preferably in the tens or dozens, if not the hundreds. At this point in our pilot, we really were starting to find about 30 to 50 books to propose as part of the package, and then identify which publishers would be good candidates for negotiating. We also decided that Knowledge and Latched would be the organization that did the fundraising, that accepted the funds for this, and that they or the library, depending on the arrangement, would create mark records out of these books. Open Syllabus Project wasn't a formal partner, but Spenfoom with Knowledge and Latched did reach out to them and basically used their information to evaluate what books were being used at other campuses, pulling information from their database of syllabi that had been scraped for ISBNs. So Spen had a broader sense of which books would make for good alliances among different universities to do fundraising around. So that was really helpful, even though Open Syllabus Project wasn't a formal partner in the arrangement. And then Internet Archive was also a key partner in this because we wanted to have an awareness, a platform to raise awareness about these books. And so with Internet Archive with Chris and Mech there, we decided on the wisdom of putting together a central list of these books that could be rescued or flipped to open access, but also to have notices on individual pages. So the idea would be almost like an Amazon preview page to be able to go to Open Library, look at the book, maybe check out the book, and then sponsor it if you wanted to flip it to open access. Internet Archive would also be advantageous as a way to gauge user interest, right? How many times are people accessing that page? How long is the queue, the line to access that book? You know, prior to the National Emergency Library, it could be a three week waiting period for just that second person in line to be able to check out a book from the Open Library using its CDL, it's controlled digital lending model. But we like the idea of having a base platform, a base availability platform with a high quality digital version of the book, with clean metadata, and so on. So Internet Archive would be not raising funds itself, but would be an awareness campaign or platform to help knowledge and match race funds for these books. So that was the basic idea of the partnership. As we put together a proposal, so Sven Fund was especially instrumental in this, I want to shout out to him, good thanks to him for that. And it's not something that we want to share more broadly, it's a confidential document, but some of the most salient points from that proposal that we put together was that we would start at about $2,750 per book to negotiate with publishers with an understanding of their peace and flexibility, and that the funder, that is in this case the California State University would get the final decision. I'm on a committee with the Cal State System called Electronic Access to Resources, so we make, we do evaluations of content centrally for the system, and then bring that to our Council of Library Deans. So this was a proposal I brought to that committee. We called it the Year Committee in the Cal State System. Part of the proposal as well was that we would buy out all back editions. We didn't want to re-license just the third edition of a book, but not have any ramifications for the first edition, second edition, or fourth and fifth edition. We want to buy out the entire series of editions of a given title to know that the money was being invested well to accommodate any kind of usage scenario or situation, because it might be the second edition that one professor is using while three other professors are using the third edition, and then the publisher might be planning a fourth edition to come out in two years. We just wanted to make sure that the whole life of that book was funded and re-licensed for up to three years in advance. And then we also wanted to ensure accessibility. So we wrote in our WCAG requirements as part of the... Whoops. You froze for a little bit, Mark. All right. So, yeah, we wanted the files to be accessible, multiple formats, and then available on multiple platforms. So COVID came along. So I pitched this proposal to our Electronic Access to Resources Committee. We looked at it, but we had many, many competing proposals, right? We have 23 universities. There's a lot of stakeholders, a lot of constituents, a lot of different needs on different campuses. So this time around, it didn't work out. And at least one of the possible reasons was COVID-19 happening. So certainly when that new started to break, we started to get concerned in February and certainly in March and started to enter more into a crisis mode, where we weren't going probably to fund new proposals. The focus became much more on wise allocation of funds to prepay things that we weren't sure we would be able to pay for later on. So our council of library deans really didn't entertain new proposals at all. And this was one of those new proposals that just didn't get time. But I'm still cautiously optimistic that maybe in a year or two years that the Cal State system will be able to allocate some significant funds for this. And I'll continue to advocate as best I can for that. The Internet Archive National Emergency Library is also part of this now, because previously when we were forming this proposal, that didn't exist. There were limits on controlled digital lending, only partner libraries. Maybe they would have one partner library or five or 10, or maybe they would have five or 10 simultaneous copies of the book. But with the National Emergency Library leveraging the inaccessibility of these books where you have dozens, if not hundreds of books now that are inaccessible to users, based on that controlled digital lending has a good case to make that comparable access means removing at least some of those limits to books. So that's part of the silver lining of this is actually Internet Archive is now being used much more by faculty and by universities and by librarians as a textbook delivery solution. Because universities feel at least for the short term, at least while the COVID crisis is happening, that we can count on access to those books. So there's more awareness of the Internet Archive. There's much more usage around it. There's much better analytics. So all of this should be advantageous if we decide to rework the proposal and ramp up a new pilot. So that's really what I'd like to see, spend food and email me this morning and say, what are next steps? And this last section is kind of what I envision to be next step. So I think we really kind of need to go back to the drawing board, what you can call it a failed pilot, or we can call it failure to launch or what have you. But maybe it's just more of a situation where we needed to wait another season for this fruit to fully ripen in order to really enjoy. So I would like to see if we do a new round and we put together a new proposal that we involved the open syllabus project much more intently, intensively to pull this off. There we go. You froze a little bit again. Okay. All right. Thank you. So yeah, if we re-envisioned the project as the proposal, I really think we should involve the open syllabus project and invite them in a much more deliberate way. Reach out to other university consortia or major universities, maybe in Georgia, Georgia State does amazing work in the open educational space, maybe Orbis Cascade or SUNY or Cooney. If we could get multiple universities all pooling our funds together on this, we would be, you know, a juggernaut to be able to really forge a new way of doing business in the space. And then major funders, you know, as I've talked with open stacks before and there are times when open stacks will, you know, get grant funds from, for instance, from the Gates Foundation, they might be half a million dollars just for a single textbook, like a biology textbook, which again is wonderful because once that's produced, it's available for the whole world. It's really high quality. But, you know, would it be possible to just take a very popular book and negotiate with publishers, you know, if it's a half million dollars or a hundred thousand dollars and flip it, you know, that would save a lot of time and effort. And so, you know, just making this process more transparent and more collaborative is going to be to our advantage. I was just running rough numbers and, you know, for that half million dollars Gates Foundation grant for open stacks to make one book, we could have flipped 180 books using this model. So, you know, whether that would have a comparable impact, that's, you know, that's something we would have to figure out. But it's just something to consider within this process. Expanding the book subsidizers or donors is also part of what I think we should be doing. So, you know, I think having big funds, really going big with this is the best way to go, whether it's funders or libraries, but I also think involving, you know, it's kind of social media campaigns and getting parents and students involved, you know, if they could give money to a book package, maybe individual titles, you know, that might not make as much sense. That's kind of what I had originally envisioned is, you know, raise funds around an individual book. And there are operations like that out there on the internet, but they don't really change things at scale, like what Cliff was saying. So, maybe there could be individual social media awareness campaigns, crowdfunding kinds of campaigns, but they should probably be channeled into the larger book packages that we're trying to put together to negotiate with publishers. I think we should, another next step is to create a global open textbook database, you know, just to have a central place where all ISBNs are listed for all university-assigned textbooks across all universities, but also get data on, you know, what courses are being assigned for, as well as estimated enrollments for those courses. Just to give us some realistic numbers about what the market is. I imagine publishers have, you know, a pretty good sense of some of this data, but it's not open, it's not out there, it's not transparent, and libraries aren't, and universities aren't aggravating this effectively. And then we wouldn't have to, you know, keep our own price or availability information, we can just pull that from other sources. And another idea might be if we had something like that to actually advance it through legislation, state, or national, or through university policies, you know, what if it was state law that we all had to make our ISBNs publicly transparent and available for all of our courses and enrollments. Again, that information's out there, you just have to know where to look, but to do it in an open way, that could be the basis of some new legislation and new policy work. Another idea that I've pitched that could be kind of related to this is a zero course, zero cost stipend for faculty, where you just directly pay faculty if they make their courses free for students. It wouldn't have to be a lot, it could be based on credit hour, but if that were done by governments, that could really ramp up faculty interest and commitment to making their materials open. And, you know, creating open materials for their students. And then I think also a platform like that, a global open textbook database could also suggest OER alternatives, right? If there's a given textbook and we're just locked in negotiations with publishers and we can't get them to budge, maybe we, you know, promote a few alternative ideas in open stacks textbook or something like that. Just, you know, again, the more transparent the whole process is, the more leverage and power we have in our negotiations with publishers. So that's a lot of information. I hope that made some sense. I don't know exactly where this is all going to go, but I really would like to continue the conversation and certainly I'm open to new collaborators, new partners, you know, in this effort. So that's it. Thanks, Mark. That was a really interesting overview. A lot of moving parts, obviously. Um, just, I just like to say I love your concept of liberating some of these materials. That's a wonderful way to think about it and look at it. I'm Diane Goldenberg Hart with the Coalition for Network Information, and I just want to welcome all of our attendees and thank you for joining this session. And again, thanks to Mark for agreeing to come and present virtually as part of this meeting. I want to invite folks now to please type your questions into the Q&A box or into the chat box, and I will be moderating. I will read them aloud to Mark, who will be answering your questions live here now. Excuse me. So I see that we do already have a question and I'll go ahead and share that. That comes from Boaz. Hi, Boaz. Who asks, first off, he wants to comment, this is an interesting project and he'd like to know how would or did the fundraising platform work via the Internet Archive? What happens if your funding exceeds the needs? Right. Yeah, those are good questions. We actually did it. This was just a proposal, so we didn't actually get into implementation stage. It was a proposal we brought to our system-wide committee and we looked at it. It was considered, we went through a voting process, and it wasn't one of the proposals that was brought forward to our council of library deans. So the Internet Archive was prepared to move forward with implementation prior to COVID. That ended up not happening. So this was, you might say, a failed proposal or it was a proposal that just didn't work this time around. And that's fine. That's having ideas and retooling them, scrapping them, recycling them maybe another time. That's just fine. So some of those details I think would need to be worked out in a new proposal. I think those are great questions. If we raise more funds than what we need, would they be allocated to a different book or a different book, series of books in negotiations with publishers? Those are all really good questions. Maybe they would go into an extra slush fund or something like that that could be used for the next project down the road. You wouldn't want to just stop the fundraising. That wouldn't make sense. So yeah, those questions actually are really important and we need to be more thoroughly addressed. Good for a follow-up. And thanks for that reply, Mark. And Boaz also has another couple of questions here. What is the vision around the API pricing that I think he means APC pricing? Will it show also how close to the target the fundraising is? Yeah, well, I brought up the API price in that last, and that was just to say polling data about price and availability from other sources, from Amazon or what have you in terms of a technological integration. So the pricing really, it's going to be per book or probably for a big number of books, 40 or 50 books maybe with a given publisher. So it would be all pre-negotiated kind of as a flat fee, you might say, to free all of these books, to relicense all of these books. In terms of fundraising and showing how close to the target, I think having something like that would be great where there's a little crowd funding thermometer or something like that that says we're halfway there. We've raised $25,000 for this book package. We need to raise $25,000 more. The Cal States are doing this and Georgia State just contributed $10,000. And then the fund thermometer goes up. I think that would be cool just in terms of the user experience and awareness raising. That's a great idea. Okay, thank you. And my apologies there. From Peggy, how did you come up with the $2,750 per book price point? Yeah, that was actually from Sven Fund at Knowledge and Latch, the CEO. So I honestly didn't. That was actually less than what I thought it would be. But it comes out of Knowledge and Latch's experience doing this kind of negotiation with publishers. So if memory serves, Sven told us that front listed titles, new titles, those typically are going for about $9,000 to $13,000 in their vendor negotiations. But back listed titles, they have Knowledge and Latch has liberated, unlatched fair number of back listed titles, and it's closer to this price point. So I think this is a little bit lower than what they usually do, but I think he wanted to start off a little lower to start the negotiations and then see where they go from there. Great. That's good to know. Very interesting. Thanks, Peggy. Now we have a question from Caleb Nichols, who asks, in addition to saying hello, Mark, hi, Mark. In your experience, what are some of the main reasons faculty are resistant to OER? Yeah, well, I've taught in universities for 15 years. I know all of us are very busy. We're creatures of habit. We develop a course around specific reading materials and transitioning over to something that's completely new, maybe problematic. There's also the reputation, academic reputation that conveys with publishers. A certain publisher publishes something, then it's good quality. And if it's coming from a newer publisher, open stacks, for instance, if they don't have that established reputation within academia, then there might be a reticence. But I'm all for meeting faculty where they are. So if we can get faculty to look at a new textbook, an open textbook, born open from open stacks or open textbook network, awesome. That's great. If we can get them to use resources that libraries have subscribed to, that's great. That's a good initiative too, and I've worked on that before. But I also think we should be thinking strategically about how we can transform the books that faculty are already using. So, you know, part of this on our library senate committee, member, he teaches African art history, and he mentioned there's a book that's about 30 years old. It's no longer in print. It's difficult for his students to find. And he would love it if that were re-licensed as open access. It would make his life and his teaching so much easier. So, you know, that was one person on one committee I serve. I'm guessing there are thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of faculty with similar stories who would love to see some of those back listed titles flip to open access. So how can we advocate for them? How can we fulfill their curricular needs? That was, yeah, great question. Thank you. And really interesting issues. We do have time for a couple more questions. If there are any out there, feel free to go ahead and type those into the Q&A box. Or if you would like to speak directly with Mark or have a comment you'd like to make live, you can raise your hand, raise your virtual hand, and I can unmute you and invite you to make those comments or ask those questions live now. While we're waiting to see if we have any more questions coming in, I just want to remind you that this webinar is brought to you as part of CNI's ongoing spring 2020 virtual membership meeting, which goes on through the end of May. And I'm sharing with you there in the chat box the direct link to our meeting schedule, which will show you the offerings we have through the end of the event. And as Cliff pointed out, we have added a few new items, a few new offerings that went out to meeting attendees this morning by email. And one of them is our closing session on Friday May 29th by Cliff Lynch, a sum up of the meeting, reflections back on the virtual event and his thinking on the current situation. So please take a look for those and sign up to join us then. Thanks again to Mark for the great presentation. And thanks again to our attendees. We appreciate you joining us. Be well and we hope to see you again soon.