Charlie Nesson - who introduces himself as “Charles the Infuriator” - is chewing on an interesting new train of thought: the openness of universities. Charlie is the founder of the Berkman Center and often drags our center in interesting new intellectual directions. Larry Lessig dedicated Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace to Charlie, declaring, “For Charlie Nesson: Whose Every Idea Seems Crazy… For About A Year.” ...
Charlie is organizing a conference at the University this summer, asking the question, “How Open Will Harvard Be to Internet and Society?” Some examples make it a bit easier to understand what he’s asking:
- At Harvard’s business school, it’s forbidden to use Google to “solve” a case study by figuring out how the business actually turned out. Is this a broken educational model, where you need to shut out the openness of knowledge to make your teaching methods work? This expands to a larger question: do we need to rethink how classrooms work in an era where everyone is capable of being in an online space at the same time as they’re in a physical space?
- Does it make sense for scholars to use public money to do research, then hand that research over to a private company, which farms them out to other scholars who perform peer review - for free - then binds and sells the research for an awful lot of money? This model may have made sense years ago, but does it make sense in a digital age, or should Harvard move towards an Open Access model for publishing?
- How does corporate or government funding of research work to make parts of universities open and closed? How do we feel about closing off areas of knowledge due to the constraints of funding?
- Universities like MIT have taken big steps towards making their courses and software open and accessible to the wider world. Why have so few American universities embraced what’s available through these repositories?
Given these questions, Charlie invites the room to suggest their topics for this conference. The room is packed, and we get a wide range of ideas offered: ...
Charlie offers his own question at the end of the brainstorm: Is the deal between Google and universities a good deal for the university world? He’s referring to the deal where Google has agreed to digitize a large portion of Harvard’s library and make the works available to the web via their search engine, and to Harvard as well. Charlie points out that the terms of the deal between Google and Harvard are secret, but that the deals with University of Michigan and the University of California are available online - he’s read the Michigan deal and refers to it as “one of the worst contracts I’ve ever read”.
The question Charlie and many others are asking about the Google deal have to do with whether the terms of the deal open up knowledge, or tether it to a single provider....
PS: This is an excellent set of questions. Every university should be discussing them.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
