Open Access introduced

I suppose I'll start here then!

This blog is intended to track, from start to finish, a research and advocacy project focussed on persuading the Brown/Labour government to implement what I will describe as the Open Access package of policies. The two key principal policies are:

• An instituted centralised hub of British open courseware from Britain's Russell Group (and contributing) research universities, at www.ocw.ac.uk. Open courseware constitutes a freely-accessible, IP-cleared, online publication of a university's full catalogue of under- and post-graduate course materials - syllabi, reading lists with links to open access papers, course notes, video/audio lecture notes, slideshows, past exam papers, assignments etc.. The pioneering university in the provision of open courseware is MIT, whose entire course materials can be found at ocw.mit.edu

• Complementing a high-quality and pluralistic British open courseware offering, I will be advocating a new kind of university qualification - an Open degree - whereby citizens can pay a premium fee and take the same exams as do existing students in enrolled face-to-face learning, with certificates signifying information about the specific courses examined on. This would be targetted, via a high-profile public information campaign, at adult learners, excluded minorities, and students at pre-university age.

The underlying economic and social basis for such policies are:

• A growing public demand for a tangible return on their investment in higher education. The current taxpayer return is based on the idea of new graduates unleashing their human capital and higher skills on a grateful underskilled non-graduate population. I argue that there is no basis, in evidence or justice, for this view, and that in an age of digital infinite abundance, all citizens should be able to see and use what they're paying for.

• Expanding access to the World Wide Web, and the negligible cost of making course materials freely available changing the scarcity assumption that has long reigned over the question of higher education course provision, to an assumption of abundance.

• The growing influence of new analyses of intellectual property and innovation, identifying considerable opportunity costs and deadweight losses from the imposition of restrictions on quality learning materials, as well as the proprietary control over much publicly-funded research publication.

There are, inevitably, a wide range of benefits, risks and resistances that would be associated with these ideas. The project is designed to explore and develop many of these benefits, and to succesfully manage or placate all of the risks. In the posts that follow, many of these will be explored - from objections from some students, academics, and the major commercial publishers involved in academic publishing - to benefits for individual and communal development, for social mobility, for existing face-to-face students and academics, as well as for international relations and towards a more just lifecourse structure.

In the posts which follow, I will provide updates on the realisation of these goals, as well as cover related developments in the movement towards open education and open certification. Any comments or queries will be happily answered.