1. SHARING DIGITAL EDUCATION RESOURCES
Vincenzo Zeno-Zencovich
Professor of comparative law
University of Roma Tre

2. SHARING DIGITAL EDUCATION RESOURCES
In Europe most universities are publicly funded
Financial accountability of university cannot be evaluated only on the basis of balance sheets, especially in countries where HE is free or at a very low tuition fee.
Universities have always had HUGE welfare effects (or positive externalities) which are extremely difficult to evaluate: how much is a graduate student worth for society? For the production of future income and tax revenues? For the growth of GDP? For social cohesion?

3. SHARING DIGITAL EDUCATION RESOURCES
Long before the web and social networks universities were, are, and will be a community of teachers and researchers
Long before the Erasmus programme students were moving throughout Europe to study in universities they perceived as prestigious
Universities are meant to disseminate their main products: educational products, research products

4. SHARING DIGITAL EDUCATION RESOURCES
Only justified exception: patentable inventions which should be registered by universities in order to avoid forms of economic parasitism (enterprises which exploit at no cost spill-over effects of scientific research conducted in universities)
Very serious form of parasitism by publishers: university professors and researchers prepare teaching materials (handbooks, case-books, selected readings, exercises) . These are ‘privatised’ by publishers which sell them at a very high cost to students and other researchers.

5. SHARING DIGITAL EDUCATION RESOURCES
Paradox: University professors receive public monies to produce teaching materials and researchers. These are given – at practically no cost or for free – to publishers which then sell the text to universities which therefore pay twice: once to produce, then to re-buy what they have produced.
Ethical issues: universities “sell” their students to publishers just as TV companies sell their audience to advertisers. But TV companies receive an appropriate remuneration. Universities receive nothing.

6. SHARING DIGITAL EDUCATION RESOURCES
Alternatives:
Open access rule: any copyrightable product (with the exception of computer software) which is produced thanks to publics funds (i.e. within a publicly funded university) MUST be published in open access
Universities must develop their own e-press in order to provide open access
Digital access is free. Print-on-demand is a commercial enterprise.

7. SHARING DIGITAL EDUCATION RESOURCES
As costs of e-press are mostly fixed costs and success of e-press is measurable in terms of downloads, rational response is creation of university consortia for digital open-access press
Sole platform to access to e-products: PPP for creation of easy and standardised uploading and research of products
Privacy compliant use of big data collected by platform

8. SHARING DIGITAL EDUCATION RESOURCES
Pooling of educational texts (handbooks etc)
Incentives for authors of educational texts
Model for texts used in university courses:
a) Each student enrolled in the class is given access to a digital copy of the material
b) File is water-marked in order that one can follow its eventual subsequent circulation
c) Author(s) receive from university a royalty for each copy, higher that what they would receive from a publisher (which generally is nil)

9. SHARING DIGITAL EDUCATION RESOURCES
d) When another university wants to use the same materials in a course it enters an agreement with the publishing university and pays an equal share of royalties.
URGENT that universities act before on-line publishing is devoured by huge multinational publishing companies (extremely negative example of SSRN being bought by Elsevier)