Notes About a Proposed Meeting with Publishers

Notes About a Proposed Meeting with Publishers

Background

A suggestion for a meeting of publishers with Sakai has come, in chronological order, from:

1. Direct requests from publishers such as the meeting of SEPP members Robert Cartolano, Columbia University, and David Ackerman, New York University, August 16, 2004.[1]

1. Direct requests to the Sakai Board as reported by Brad Wheeler and Joseph Hardin.

1. Request by Board Member Vivian Sinou to expedite making packaged learning content available to Sakai users.

Although not stated, subsequent discussions confirmed, McGraw-Hill was concerned about “yet another format” to the 24 currently produced for their textbooks. Although McGraw-Hill does produce SCORM-compliant packages, the SCORM specification is insufficient to ensure portability of SCORM content.[2] The cost of support—the help desk for implementing faculty—appears to be increases exponentially with the number of formats at a time there is student concern about the cost of textbooks.[3]

Sakai co-chairs Brad Wheeler and Joseph Hardin has reported inquiries from publishers, generally about the Sakai Commercial Affiliates or participation in Sakai conferences and Discussion Groups.

Sakai Board member Vivian Sinou has requested an early meeting in order to have content available for the fall term.

There is another factor. Publishers may sense Sakai is only broadly participatory organization interested and effective in achieve complete interoperability specifications as contrasted to those permitting proprietary “out of band” agreements. If the IMS Tool Portability Working Group achieves broadly implemented interoperability, then Sakai will be recognized as a standards-setting community.

There are two types of publications. One is packaged learning content that could be used with Sakai software (e.g. The University of California, Davis, SCORM reader or JISC's Reload simple sequencing engine). Another is either on-line journals or other documents or media delivered to the student or researcher in real-time such as JSTOR on-line journals.

JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) has licenses to electronic content for students, faculty, and staff members of many of the universities and colleges in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. JISC and the publishers are transitioning from a central authentication service called Athens to a federated system based on Shibboleth (or soon SAM 2.0).[4] JISC has a long-term and broad relationship with publishers and coordination with SURF in the Netherlands. Also, a substantial and growing number of publishers in the U.S. are now owned by UK and Dutch firms.[5]

E-mail exchanges with Internet 2/MACE representative Steven Carmody, Brown University, said Internet 2/MACE has been talking with the publishers about authentication and authorization.[6] These have been with one publisher at a time. I suggested that a structured meeting with all interested publishers may achieve greater interoperability more quickly.[7]

Recommendations

If the purpose is either to discuss the relationship between Sakai and publishers or to learn what formats publishers can support for Sakai this fall or discuss a plan to achieve interoperability with Sakai software, then an early meeting with publishers would be useful. If so, then representatives of the Content Discussion Group could have a major role and could guide the agenda. If JISC and /or SURF and/or Internet 2/MACE/Shibboleth representatives could attend, the meeting may better represent user interests and signal cooperation to publishers.

If the purpose is to achieve interoperability, the Content Discussion Group could establish the agenda and prepare materials for the meeting. One way to encourage a productive meeting would be for the Content Discussion Group to prepare a draft and complete specification for “Sakai content” by extending existing standards eliminating ambiguity and selecting options, circulate the draft to the publishers before the meeting requesting comments, and the provide attendees with a summary of comments before the meeting.

If the purpose is to make packaged content available for the fall term, then the software developers and some publishers will have to reach agreement on specifications. This may be difficult within the time available. A plan to specify, produce, test, and document a “Sakai standard” may be a reasonable outcome from the meting.

CLIR choose New York City for their meeting with publishers to encourage attendance—many publishers have offices in New York City. No representatives from the parent companies in the UK, Germany, or the Netherlands attended. Sakai may want to consider location, especially if representatives from other countries are to attend.

Jim Farmer118 March 2005

[1]See the Sakai presentation “The Sakai Project and Educational Partners Program, 16 August 2004 for the material presented by those from Sakai. McGraw-Hill did not provide written material.

[2]CETIS is testing interoperability with limited success even when the packaged content complies with the SCORM specifications.

[3]“Ripoff 101: How the Current Practices of the Textbook Industry Drive Up the Cost of College Textbooks,”Merriah Fairchild, California Public Interest Research Group, January 2004. The cost of content developed for faculty use, including examination questions , multimedia presentations, and teaching guides, was not discussed in the report.

[4]The developers of QuanXi software, a JISC-funded project, has developed a rich Shibboleth implementation and announced, at the 14 March 2005 CETIS Enterprise SIG meeting that SAML 2.0 will be supported. This implementation includes authorization.

[5]For example, Elsevier is implementing standard formats and processes throughout its 80 subsidiaries. See “Report to the JA-SIG Board,” 26 May 2002 for notes from the CLIR sponsored meeting with publishers as New York University. Elsevier invited the JA-SIG developers to attend the three-day training session being offered to IT departments in the subsidiaries, but no one was able to attend.

[6]The Internet 2/MACE Shibboleth team has been clear that Shibboleth is limited to authentication. At the 20 August 2004 PESC e-Authentication Assembly, principal SAML author Scott Cantor, Ohio State University, cited the lack of “Standardized attribute profiles” as a barrier to interoperability. This observation is the source of discussions with Steven Carmody. Cantor also commented that SAML 2.0 may “Support non- browser profiles in a consistent fashion (including, but not limited to, web services).” At the New York University meeting, Elsevier announced they were moving to Web Services internally, but would continue to support the more than 100 authentication/authorization methods currently in use by university and colleges customers.

[7]Cantor also said “politicization” was a barrier to implementation of SAML 2.0. College and university librarians would like content—on-line or packaged—to be made available to the campus community. Deans, asked to pay licensing fees, would prefer to purchase licenses restricted to their students. As long as an effective method of authorization is not available, schools and departments depend upon shared passwords for authorization. This approaches bypasses the library for on-line content delivery.