Rice's Digital University Press

I've written before about Rice University's Connexions platform and programme, which aims to make courseware freely available for all kinds of interesting re-use. But there's another side to Rice's re-invention of academic publishing:

Rice University has re-launched its university press as an all-digital operation. Using the open-source e-publishing platform Connexions, Rice University Press is returning from a decade-long hiatus to explore models of peer-reviewed scholarship for the 21st century. The technology offers authors a way to use multimedia — audio files, live hyperlinks or moving images — to craft dynamic scholarly arguments, and to publish on-demand original works in fields of study that are increasingly constrained by print publishing.

Rice's digital press operates just as a traditional press, up to a point. Manuscripts will be solicited, reviewed, edited and resubmitted for final approval by an editorial board of prominent scholars. But rather than waiting for months for a printer to make a bound book, Rice University Press's digital files will instead be run through Connexions for automatic formatting, indexing and population with high-resolution images, audio and video and Web links.

Users of Rice University Press titles are able to view the content online for free or, thanks to Connexions' partnership with on-demand printer QOOP, order printed books in every style from softbound black-and-white on inexpensive paper to leather-bound, full-color hardbacks on high-gloss paper.

Perhaps the best place to find out about why and how Rice is doing this is an interview with Charles Henry, publisher at Rice University Press (you might need to register to access this article, but it's free). (Via Open Access News.)

All the Right Connexions

Even though MIT's OpenCourseWare is better-known, Rice's Connexions programme is arguably a more innovative and thorough-going example of the open courseware concept. For a start, it's based on the open source Rhaptos sofware, whereas MIT's is proprietary. But Connexions is also going further in terms of re-inventing education.

So, as well as its open courseware, it is making materials available as print on demand books, that can be individually customised. It hopes that this move will enable it to become self-sufficient, helped along the way by another grant from the enlightened Hewlett Foundation, which is driving much of the best work in open access and open courseware:

Connexions' initial revenue streams will come from the sale of books. In one case, Connexions plans to found a University Press Consortium that allows member presses to offer print-on-demand publication of money-losing monographs that are academically important but which simply cost too much to publish. The model builds upon Rice's announcement in July that it would use Connexions to revive its own university press, which was shuttered in 1996. The reopened Rice University Press published its first title, "Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age," early this month (see http://cnx.org/content/col10376/1.1).

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Connexions also plans to develop a catalog of the 10 most-popular community college textbooks, which also will be free for online viewing and cost less than $30 when purchased as hardbound books.

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Connexions' final revenue-generating plan involves licensing its platform to companies for in-house corporate training. This model will allow companies to slash costs for updating printed materials, particularly for large product lines, and Connexions' robust translation features will allow companies to easily convert courses and texts into other languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Thai, Japanese and Italian.

Kudos to Richard Baraniuk for initiating what is proving to be a hugely ambitious project. I wish it well.

Making All the Right Connexions

A couple of months back I had the pleasure of interviewing Richard Baraniuk for an article about open content for LWN.net. As I wrote then:

Just as open source avoids re-inventing the wheel by building on existing code, so open courseware aims to save time, effort and money by making educational material freely available for others to re-use, extend and improve.

The first such project, Connexions, came from Rice University. It was the brainchild of Richard Baraniuk, professor of electrical engineering, who was directly inspired by the example of open source. Connexions uses a content creation platform called Rhaptos, which is released under the GNU GPL.

Connexions is a fascinating exercise in re-inventing university course materials, but Baraniuk told me that they were planning to go even further. Now Rice has announced that it is to use print-on-demand technologies to produce academic textbooks in a completely new way. As the press release explains:

Rice University's innovative Connexions today announced an on-demand printing agreement with QOOP Inc. that will allow students and instructors anywhere in the world to order high-quality, hardbound textbooks from Connexions - in most cases for less than $25.

The deal positions Connexions to take the lead in open-source textbook publishing as soon as it completes software needed to feed each of its titles to QOOP's on-demand publishing platform. Connexions plans to offer more than 100 titles for online purchase by year's end.

"From its inception, Connexions has used the Web to go beyond print," said Connexions founder Richard Baraniuk. "Connexions lets pupils and instructors make cross-disciplinary intellectual leaps with a simple mouse click, following knowledge wherever learning takes them.

"But being Web-based is also about access, and because our materials are freely available to everyone, we needed an easy, low-cost way to let people use a book if that's the medium they are most comfortable learning from," said Baraniuk, the Victor C. Cameron Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

QOOP's on-demand service will allow Connexions users to order customized course guides and a variety of fully developed Connexions textbooks. Standard paperbacks will take just 3-5 days to produce and ship, and traditional hardbacks will take about a week to produce. QOOP ships directly to customers.

No other publisher of open-source educational content can match Connexions offerings. This is partly due to Connexions early adoption of Creative Commons open licenses. Because all content on the site is authored under these licenses, there are no copyright conflicts to negotiate.

Open content, open source - sounds like all the right connexions are being made.

Open University Meets Open Courseware

Great news (via Open Access News and the Guardian): the Open University is turning a selection of its learning materials into open courseware. To appreciate the importance of this announcement, a little background may be in order.

As its fascinating history shows, the Open University was born out of Britain's optimistic "swinging London" culture of the late 1960s. The idea was to create a university open to all - one on a totally new scale of hundreds of thousands of students (currently there are 210,000 enrolled). It was evident quite early on that this meant using technology as much as possible (indeed, as the history explains, many of the ideas behind the Open University grew out of an earlier "University of the Air" idea, based around radio transmissions.)

One example of this is a close working relationship with the BBC, which broadcasts hundreds of Open University programmes each week. Naturally, these are open to all, and designed to be recorded for later use - an early kind of multimedia open access. The rise of the Web as a mass medium offered further opportunities to make materials available. By contrast, the holdings of the Open University Library require a username and password (although there are some useful resources available to all if you are prepared to dig around).

Against this background of a slight ambivalence to open access, the announcement that the Open University is embracing open content for at least some of its courseware is an extremely important move, especially in terms of setting a precedent within the UK.

In the US, there is already the trail-blazing MIT OpenCourseWare project. Currently, there are materials from around 1250 MIT courses, expected to rise to 1800 by 2007. Another well-known example of open courseware is the Connexions project, which has some 2900 modules. This was instituted by Rice University, but now seems to be spreading ever wider. In this it is helped by an extremely liberal Creative Commons licence, that allows anyone to use Connexions material to create new courseware. MIT uses a Creative Commons licence that is similar, except it forbids commercial use.

At the moment, there's not much to see at the Open University's Open Content Initiative site. There is an interesting link is to information from the project's main sponsor, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, about its pioneering support for open content. This has some useful links at the foot of the page to related projects and resources.

One thing the Open University announcement shows is that open courseware is starting to pick up steam - maybe a little behind the related area of open access, but coming through fast. As with all open endeavours, the more there are, the more evident the advantages of making materials freely available becomes, and the more others follow suit. This virtuous circle of openness begetting openness is perhaps one of the biggest advantages that it has over the closed, proprietary alternatives, which by their very nature take an adversarial rather than co-operative approach to those sharing their philosophy.