By Wednesday afternoon, close to 13,000 people had signed, more than half the goal of 25,000. According to the site’s rules, if a petition gets 25,000 signatures within 30 days, it goes to the president’s chief of staff and will get a response from the White House.

Only two paragraphs long, the petition gets to the point quickly: “We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.”

The petitioners note that the National Institutes of Health’s public-access policy “proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process,” and they urge the president “to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.”

John Wilbanks, a senior fellow in entrepreneurship at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, decided to try a petition after he and other open-access proponents met recently with John Holdren, science adviser to President Obama. “It was a nice meeting, but everyone’s always very noncommittal, and it was sort of the same old same old,” Mr. Wilbanks said. “Something had to change the conversation.”

Three other champions of open access joined Mr. Wilbanks in creating the petition: Michael W. Carroll, a professor of law at American University’s Washington College of Law; Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or Sparc; and Mike Rossner, executive director of Rockefeller University Press. Coming out of the meeting with Mr. Holdren, they felt frustrated, Mr. Wilbanks said. “It seemed like nothing was changing,” he said, even though public access has. So Mr. Wilbanks et al. decided that “we might as well see if we can go direct to the public.”

This may be an auspicious time to get the public to weigh in. Mr. Holdren heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which last fall put out calls for input on public access to scholarly publications and to data. No policies have been issued yet as a result.

Meanwhile, recent debates on three bills–the Stop Online Piracy Act, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, and the Research Works Act–called more attention to the issue of online access to information. Those bills failed to move forward, while one favored by open-access champions, the Federal Research Public Access Act, got a boost when the commercial scholarly publisher Elsevier became the target of a boycott by researchers angry over its journal-pricing and access policies. That boycott petition, the Cost of Knowledge, has attracted almost 12,000 signers.

There’s been a lot of action on the open-access front in Europe, too. The Wellcome Trust, one of Britain’s largest funders of biomedical research, has thrown its weight behind open access. David Willetts, Britain’s minister for universities and science, announced this month that the government wanted to make publicly financed research freely available. And the European Union reportedly plans to put its money behind open-access publishing as well.

“There’s a zeitgeist around this,” Mr. Wilbanks said. “We’ve spent a decade building a movement around open access, and we have technology systems that make it quite easy to get the word out.”

[Animation by Mike McCarthy for Access2Research.]

Washington

A fairly new archival-authority standard, released in 2010, could change that. It has the less-than-euphonious name of Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families, or EAC-CPF. And it’s helped inspire a push to create a cooperative national infrastructure to regularize and connect archival records.

A group of archivists and other interested parties gathered at the National Archives here on Monday and Tuesday to talk about what a National Archival Authorities Cooperative, or NAAC, would look like, and how to get there from here.

Representatives from the Archives, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Library of Medicine, the National Agricultural Library, and other federal entities sat in. So did archivists from state and regional archives and from individual universities, including Brandeis, Fordham, Harvard, Nebraska, and Yale.

A Small-Scale Model

They tackled three big issues: the business, governance, and technical requirements of such an enterprise. And they left with apparent consensus that they were onto a good idea and that they had the enthusiasm to come up with a plan, even if the details weren’t yet clear.

People “will have to be convinced not with hyperbole but with a good sound plan about how to move forward,” said Daniel V. Pitti, associate director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, or IATH, at the University of Virginia. Mr. Pitti convened the meeting. The Institute of Museum and Library Services is providing financial support for the planning stage.

To get the discussion going, Mr. Pitti and some of his collaborators gave attendees a close look at an archival-authorities experiment in progress, the Social Networks and Archival Context Project, or SNAC. It’s a joint venture that includes researchers and developers at IATH, the California Digital Library, and the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information.

The idea is to bring together archival records in standardized form so that users can navigate among them and see the biographical and cultural contexts that disparate collections document. Mr. Pitti told the audience that SNAC shows how “archival authority, as we have been able to dig it out of traditional archival finding aids, is full of interesting treasures.”

Drawing on records from the Library of Congress, the Northwest Digital Archives, the Online Archive of California, and Virginia Heritage, the SNAC team created about 175,000 records using the EAC-CPF standard. Imagine doing that on a much bigger scale, Mr. Pitti suggested. “We think we can start it. We can get it going,” he said. “But ultimately it’s going to need the community if it’s going to become a sustainable, ongoing resource for users.”

‘Table Your Inner Eeyores’

After the discussion of SNAC, attendees broke up into three working groups to discuss essential questions. Who would host a national cooperative? Who would be able to contribute records? How would it be sustained and maintained? Would its target audience or users be archivists, scholars, the public, or all of the above? As one attendee asked later, at a session pulling together the various threads, “Are we building this for us, or are we building it for them?”

At times the meeting threatened to bog down in technical and best-practices debates, but Mr. Pitti and Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information, in the role of interested interlocutor, kept things moving along. Mr. Pitti urged the group to “table your inner Eeyores for just a little while” and to dream big.

Mr. Lynch described a fast-changing landscape with “outbreaks of authority control” everywhere, involving many institutions and different kinds of collections. “This is really one piece, and a very well-timed piece, in a whole series of activities that are happening right now,” he said. Archivists might be the primary users of a national cooperative, he said, but scholars are another important community to include.

“We’ve got a lot of knowledge that’s created, codified, and then goes away,” he said, “because there’s no place to put it.”

Mr. Pitti concluded by observing that an essential, early step will be to find a home for NAAC—perhaps the National Archives, which seemed to be a consensus first choice. (The Archives has shown some interest in that idea but has not made a formal commitment.)

The conference’s organizers will now pull together the ideas discussed here, write them up, and circulate them, aiming to refine and publish them as a white paper in the fall of 2013. In the meantime, a couple of smaller meetings and a number of regional workshops will bring archivists up to speed on EAC-CPF.

As one attendee said, “This is a chance to lead with a new standard.”

["Maddie Defines Big," featuring the exterior of the National Archives building in Washington, D.C. Creative Commons-licensed photo by Flickr user cometstarmoon.]

“The game industry has done a good job of grabbing and maintaining the attention of both young people and adults,” said Thomas Kalil, deputy director for policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The industry has also managed to keep players on the “knife’s edge” as they persevere through tough challenges without getting frustrated and giving up, he said.

He delivered his comments at a forum, presented by The Atlantic, that examined how educational technology could help students land the growing number of jobs that require science, mathematics, and technology know-how.

Andrea L. Taylor, the Microsoft Corporation’s director for North America community affairs, said the company had 5,000 jobs with starting salaries of $100,000 or more that are going unfilled because applicants lack the required technological skills.

She said that an applicant who came to Microsoft with some kind of certificate showing that he or she had entry-level skills in technology “could be trained on the job.”

Satish Menon, chief technology officer at the Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix, also plugged certificates as alternatives to degrees in a tech field. “The real disruption will take place as companies say, ‘If you can demonstrate mastery, we’ll hire you. We don’t care if you have a degree,’” he said.

Mr. Kalil mentioned a wildly popular online course in artificial intelligence that attracted 160,000 students as evidence that online classes can teach tech skills relatively cheaply. “There are high fixed costs associated with development,” he said, “but the marginal costs of making it available to people is essentially zero.”

The report, “Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence From Randomized Trials,” is based on a study conducted by Ithaka S+R, a consultancy on the use of technology in teaching.

The finding that hybrid courses are no better or worse than traditional ones isn’t, as it might appear, “a bland result,” said one of the co-authors, William G. Bowen, president emeritus of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“One of the responses most frequently raised in efforts to experiment with this kind of teaching is that it will expose students to risk,” he said in an interview. “The results of this study show that such worries are overblown.”

The results do indicate that such courses, as they exist today, “do no harm,” said Mr. Bowen, who serves as a senior adviser to the Ithaka group. “But surely these courses are going to improve dramatically as they become more customizable and more fun.”

Some experts advocate online classes as a way to deliver courses more economically and effectively, particularly for members of minority groups and others who might be subject to stereotypes in a classroom setting. Meanwhile, skeptics suspect that online approaches depersonalize education and shortchange students.

“We felt it was important to do a rigorous, randomized study so we could see if the extreme claims on either side of the divide are justified,” Mr. Bowen said.

The study compared how much students at six public universities learned after taking a prototype introductory statistics course in the fall of 2011 in either a hybrid or a traditional format. The researchers randomly assigned a diverse group of 605 students to either a hybrid group, in which they learned with computer-guided instruction and one hour of face-to-face instruction each week, or a traditional format, usually with three or four hours of face-to-face instruction per week.

The result? “We find that learning outcomes are essentially the same—that students in the hybrid format pay no ‘price’ for this mode of instruction in terms of pass rates, final exam scores, and performance on a standardized assessment of statistical literacy,” the report concluded.

The authors also found that using the hybrid approach in large introductory courses “has the potential to significantly reduce instructor compensation costs in the long run.”

The report emphasizes that its conclusions don’t apply to all online instruction, just a specific type of interactive online course in which computer-guided instruction substitutes for some face-to-face instruction.

The findings were consistent among all groups and campuses, the authors said. Half of the students tested were from families earning less than $50,000, and half were first-generation college students.

Large public universities that face growing pressures to cut costs and improve graduation rates stand the most to gain from refining the hybrid approach, particularly for large introductory courses, the authors note.

“As resistant as some might still be even to think about seeking productivity gains in order to reduce teaching costs, there is simply no denying the need to look more closely than ever before at the relation between certain ‘outputs’ (approximated, for example, by degrees conferred) and ‘inputs’ (the mix of labor and capital that defines educational production functions),” the report says. “It is essential that the limited resources available to higher education be used as effectively as possible.”

The new effort, called PurdueHUB-U, will serve up modular online courses with video lectures, interactive visualizations, and tools for students to interact with their peers and the professor. The project’s leaders hope it will improve face-to-face classes and bring in revenue by attracting students around the world.

PurdueHUB-U grew out of a course taught this year on Purdue’s nanoHUB, a collaborative platform for nanotechnology research. The course, on the fundamentals of nanoelectronics, was broken into two parts that lasted a few weeks each. It attracted 900 students from 27 countries, most of whom paid $30 for the class and a certificate of completion. Students also had the option to turn their certificates into continuing-education credits for an additional $195.

Timothy D. Sands, Purdue’s provost, called that pricing model a “low outer paywall” that was much cheaper than traditional credit-hour charges, but not quite free. He added that the project will first focus on developing online course materials to transform the university’s face-to-face classes. Mr. Sands said the course modules could also be offered to Purdue alumni, allowing them to continue their education after they graduate.

The effort is more modest than other universities’ recent forays into the world of vast, open online courses. EdX, the online-education project recently announced by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was created with a $60-million joint investment. PurdueHUB-U, meanwhile, will be backed by a seed investment of $2-million over its first four years. Purdue estimates that the project’s revenue will cover its expenses within five years.

“We’re pretty confident that it’ll take off, at least on campus, and that it will become a way for us to go forward in terms of expanding our global footprint as well,” Mr. Sands said.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by WebWizzard]

Campus-gossip Web sites like JuicyCampus and CollegeACB used the lure of anonymity to entice students to post on them. The cloak gave students a virtual bathroom wall on which to write racy rumors and explicit insults about their peers without fear of being exposed.

Now, the creator of a similar site at Pennsylvania State University has apparently turned that veil of secrecy inside-out, hoping to teach students a public lesson about cyberbullying.

In a bait-and-switch prank, the creator of PSUacb.com has revealed information about students who posted to the site, including their full names and Penn State e-mail usernames. Onward State, a Penn State news blog, reported the news this week.

“Fooled you,” says a note recently posted to the site, which was redesigned with a list of students’ names on the last day of the semester. After once tweeting that “its a beautiful day to anonymously judge others,” the person behind the Twitter account @PSUacb announced “check out our new design!” last week.

“90% of this website was me having [expletive] conversations with myself,” the site’s message reads. “Still, thousands of people read it. Almost every thread on this site received at least 1000 views and I’ve been raking in advertising money.”

The other 10% of the site was apparently made up of posts written by Penn State students who were never really anonymous. “I tracked the user behind every post,” the note says. The list now published on the site includes students’ names and the contents of the posts they wrote, with a promise of more to come.

“Our hope is that the ‘redesign’ will discourage students from posting this kind of content on any similar sites,” wrote one member of the group behind the site in an e-mail interview with The Chronicle, who described PSUacb as a social experiment meant to teach students about the evils of cyberbullying.

“On the Internet, people will post terrible things that they would never want associated with their true identity,” the site’s creator wrote to The Chronicle. “However, they took anonymity for granted.”

Though the identities of PSUacb’s posters have been revealed, the site’s creator would only comment anonymously, for fear of physical violence. “Although we stand behind our decision to reveal the identities of posters and we are confident that what we have done is legal, we have made some enemies with this site,” the site’s creator wrote. Angry e-mails have poured in from people whose names were published, as well as praise from leaders in the Greek community and people who had been harassed on CollegeACB, according to the site’s creator. As a concession to some of the complaints, the creator has removed the site from the reach of search engines.

The published list indicates that PSUacb was a hub for Greek life where students ranked Penn State’s fraternities and sororities. Under the topic of “Best Guys in SAE and Sig Chi,” one student wrote, “All the ladies know these guys are the best frat daddys at penn state: hot, smart, and destined to make alot of money one day (if they’re not rich already),” before mentioning a fellow student by name. Another post asked, “How were the sororities hazed this semester?? Lets hear it from the actual girls who went through the pledging.”

Gossip sites like these pose tough questions for college leaders. Some students say the anonymous forums are breeding grounds for harassment. A few colleges tried to slow down the sites in the past by blocking them on their campuses or asking their creators to remove posts that named students. But other administrators have said there’s little they can do to intervene, since the sites typically live on servers beyond a college’s control. And some have been wary to hamper students’ free-speech rights by policing online forums.

At Penn State, university police received a complaint related to the site last week, according to university spokeswoman Lisa Powers. Ms. Powers said in an e-mail interview that “there is nothing we can do by way of banning it,” since university police looked into the complaint and found it to be a free-speech issue, much like the questions that arose surrounding JuicyCampus.

“There does not appear to be threatening content—which would be actionable—and the information that was posted related to identities is directory information already available on the Web, so there aren’t any violations in that regard that can be remedied either,” Ms. Powers added. She wrote that it’s likely that student-affairs administrators will have more conversations with students about their online activity, especially in the Greek community.

“Members need to be more educated and understand all ramifications of what they do online,” Ms. Powers wrote. “If fewer people visited these types of sites and fewer participated in the site, the site would at some point become pointless and perhaps cease to exist.”

PSUacb’s message to Web visitors ends on a similar—if more direct—note.

“Moral of the story: Grow the [expletive] up and stop talking [expletive] on the Internet.”

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by ell brown]

The collaboration, announced today, will give students two different ways to save money when pursuing academic credit. Beginning in the fall, students can study free courses on Saylor.org and then enroll at StraighterLine to take an exam. After passing, they will receive American Council on Education recommended credit.  Students could also enroll in a StraighterLine program, using Saylor’s free course materials as they go along.

Alana Harrington, director of the Saylor Foundation, said her group’s repository of free online courses won’t go anywhere, and will still grant certificates of completion. But the partnership with StraighterLine will give students a way to get credit for low-cost online courses that’s more meaningful than a certificate.

“We understand the fact that to some students, the pure acquisition of knowledge or the certificate proving their competency isn’t enough,” she said. “Credit is a form of currency today.” The two groups have not yet decided which Saylor courses students can take for credit through the new program.

StraighterLine and the Saylor Foundation will also team up with George Mason University and Northern Virginia Community College to offer students an easier method of transferring credits between the institutions.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by Tax Credits]

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today announced a partnership that will host online courses from both institutions free of charge. The platform, its creators say, has the potential to improve face-to-face classes on the home campuses while giving students around the world access to a blue-ribbon education.

The new venture, called edX, grew out of MIT’s announcement last year that it would offer free online courses on a platform called MITx. The combined effort will be overseen by a nonprofit organization governed equally by both universities, each of which has committed $30-million to the project. Anant Agarwal,  director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who led the development of MITx, will serve as edX’s first president.

Students who complete the courses on the edX platform will not receive university credit, although they could earn certificates.

At a news conference, the leaders of edX described it as a tool that colleges can use to experiment with online courses and study how students learn. For example, Mr. Agarwal said, in the prototype MITx course “Circuits and Electronics,” researchers “gather huge amounts of data” on students’ use of the platform, including how much time they spend watching videos.

Since edX courses have the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of students, the data sets could be “very statistically significant in a very short amount of time,” he said.

edX plans to host its first courses this fall, across an array of disciplines. Mr. Agarwal said the platform would allow colleges to join Harvard and MIT in creating brands with the “x” signifier, also would be offered as open-source software for institutions that want to build on it. It will be distinct from the continuing distance-education programs at Harvard and MIT, including Harvard’s Extension School and MIT’s OpenCourseWare, which has been putting course materials online for a decade.

L. Rafael Reif, MIT’s provost, said the driving force behind the partnership wa “not to make money” but to improve learning for both the universities’ traditional students and the public at large. But, he added, the project will need to find a way to support itself, and its leaders are exploring ways to help it be self-sustaining.

“Clearly, we want to make sure that this does not become a drain on the budgets of Harvard and MIT,” Mr. Reif said.

Other elite universities have attempted online-education programs that were closed after experiencing financial woes. Those efforts included Fathom, a project led by Columbia University that ended in 2003; and AllLearn, a collaboration that closed its doors in 2006.

The partnership between Harvard and MIT is one piece of an online-education revival among elite universities that has emerged in the past year. The edX announcement comes after four top-tier institutions teamed up last month with a for-profit company led by two Stanford computer-science professors to offer a similar array of free online courses. Stanford University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor announced the partnerships with Coursera, a company that sprouted from Stanford’s early experiments with massive open online courses.

George Siemens, associate director of Athabasca University’s Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute and a pioneer of massive open online courses, as they are known, said the creation of edX represents in part an attempt by two universities to reclaim space in open online education, where venture capitalists have recently gained a foothold. While Coursera plans eventually to profit from its course offerings, he noted, it’s not yet clear how edX will support itself, and the model its leaders choose will dictate its longevity.

“Is there a sustainability model in place for these initiatives?” he asked. “Otherwise, it will end up being what happened with Fathom and others.”

Depending on how edX develops, Mr. Siemens said, the project may even begin to affect the basis for colleges’ accreditation. In a decade, he speculated, campus administrators may view this recent period of college investment in online-education projects as the moment when the alternative-credential model took off.

“It’s a natural progression of the Internet influencing and impacting what we thought was a pretty stable field,” he said. “But all it takes is six months of pretty surprising announcements in terms of open-course initiatives, and all of a sudden you can start to picture that education seems to be at the threshold of a very dramatic change.”

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by takomabibelot]

David Willetts (left), Britain’s minister for universities and science and a member of the Conservative Party, made the announcement today at the general meeting of the U.K. Publishers Association in London. (The full text of Mr. Willetts’s remarks is available here.) He shared the gist of the news in a column published yesterday in The Guardian newspaper.

“Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and will put the U.K. at the forefront of open research,” Mr. Willetts wrote. “The challenge is how we get there without ruining the value added by academic publishers.”

He did not explain how the government plans to accomplish that. He did note that the transition to open access is likely to be complicated. “Moving from an era in which taxpayer-funded academic articles are stuck behind pay walls for much of their life to one in which they are available free of charge will not be easy,” he wrote.

Janet Finch, a British sociologist and academic administrator, has been put in charge of producing a report on “setting out the steps needed to fulfill our radical ambition,” according to Mr. Willetts. “She is working with all interested parties and her report will appear before the summer.”

The minister said that Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, will also be advising the British government “on the common standards that will have to be agreed and adopted for open access to be a success.” Mr. Wales will also be involved in “the new government-funded portal for accessing research” to be created as part of the plan.

The Chronicle talked about the Willetts announcement with Eric Merkel-Sobotta, executive vice president for corporate communications at Springer, at the spring meeting of the International Association of Scientific, Technical, & Medical Publishers, taking place May 2-3 in Washington, D.C. Mr. Merkel-Sobotta is chairman of the association’s board.

Springer uses a combination of open-access and conventional business models. “Anything that’s good for science is fine with us,” Mr. Merkel-Sobotta said when asked what Springer thought about the Willetts announcement. “My question is, What kind of business model are they going to use?” Open access comes in many forms. One of them, so-called gold OA, “is just so not controversial any more,” he said. “It’s a business model. And that’s all it is. And it works as a business model for certain disciplines.”

Publishers have been aware of the British government’s interest in open access for some time, Mr. Merkel-Sobotta said, and have been participating in Ms. Finch’s consultation process. “We’re not as well represented or as loud as the other side,” he added.

Given the lack of details so far, “it’s too early to say whether this will be a success,” he said of the plan. “It looks like setting off fireworks, but nobody’s really sure what holiday we’re celebrating.”

[Image: official photo of David Willetts, Britain's minister for universities and science.]

The University of California at Berkeley has won a $60-million grant from the Simons Foundation to create a new center for theoretical computer science, the university announced today.

The center, called the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, will give researchers a place to explore complex mathematical algorithms that could help solve everyday problems in climate science, health care, economics, and other fields. The Simons Foundation, which focuses on advancing research in science and mathematics, selected Berkeley from a group of three finalists.

Richard M. Karp, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the university, has been named the institute’s founding director. He noted that the new institute won’t be a simple computing center where researchers will process their data. Instead, researchers there will train the methods of theoretical computer science on questions as varied as how cells work and how economies work. He added that problems in many scientific fields, including biology, are “information-processing problems” that could be opened up by a computational approach.

“You can think of cancer as a kind of algorithm gone wrong, where somehow the mechanisms of cell reproduction have been hijacked,” he said. “And if we can understand just where in that algorithm the abnormality occurs, we have a possibility for intervening in cancer.” He added that researchers could use algorithms to find new insights in the streams of “big data” that play an increasingly prominent role in scientific inquiry.

The institute will host about 70 visiting researchers at a time, Mr. Karp said. It will begin operating in July, and its first scientific programs will start next January.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by luckey_sun]