On January 8, the Dies Natalis of the University of Amsterdam, Rector Magnificus Karen Maex delivered a speech on protecting independent and public knowledge. In it she calls on the European Commission to establish a “Digital University Act” (as a supplement to the recently proposed Digital Services Act) to support universities and their independent role in the knowledge system. Although I welcome any support in this direction, let me be blunt and argue that this particular call is misguided, perhaps even cowardly pointing to someone else to solve the problem the universities themselves created and that they are very well capable of solving themselves.
In short, the Digital University Act proposed by Rector Magnificus Maex aims to:
There is no denying there is a problem on all four counts. But the universities deny their own responsibility in being the cause of these problems, and totally underestimate their own power to solve these problems and to build an independent platform to create, educate, publish and archive scientific knowledge.
Let me be brief about the cause. For decades the universities have (under governmental pressure to cut costs) outsourced essential services up to the point that some no longer run their own mail or file servers. They themselves are responsible for the shambles of scientific publishing, where commercial publishers like Elsevier and Kluwer were allowed to reap huge profits over the writing, reviewing and editorial work performed ‘for free’ by academics.
Let me now turn to the solutions, and especially the power of universities themselves to solve these problems.
Regarding public storage and access to research data generated by universities. This is easy: storage is cheap. If you are unwilling to set up your own storage server, rent space at an arbitrary cloud storage provider. Encrypt the data when this is necessary for privacy or security reasons, and implement proper access control in this case. This is not rocket science.
The same goes for offering free, open access to university research publications. Scientist already do all the real work in the scientific publishing process, and there are great tools and platforms out there that offer open access like the Open Journal Systems developed by the Public Knowledge Project and the Open Library of Humanities (OLH). A crucial detail is proper archiving to ensure lasting, eternal, access.
Providing control over digital learning and research tools (productivity tools, learning environments, video conferencing, etc.) is a tougher nut to crack. Observe that this transcends universities and that society at large would benefit from independent, easy to use, productivity tools. How hard would it be to develop a self-hostable, easy to use platform or software suite that support real time collaboration? Imagine a Google Apps without the Google part. And there is no need to start from scratch: there are already many open source tools that offer most of the functionality (although we can argue about their ease of use). I believe that universities could play a much larger role here in organising, maintaining and developing such alternatives. Disciplines could work together to improve them. Students and staff could contribute to their development. I see a huge, very underused potential there.
Contributing to the development of such tools, and hosting and maintaining them yourself may incur a cost, in terms of resources and personnel. But I think this is a fair price to pay for increased autonomy.
This leaves the last aim of the proposed Digital University Act, to force large (social media) platforms to offer access to the data they generate, for research purposes. Yes, this is very important. And indeed this is something beyond the power of universities. On this, our governments and the European Committee need to act.
But regarding the first three, at least in the Netherlands we have organisations like SURF where
education and research institutions work together on ICT facilities and innovation in order to make full use of the opportunities offered by digitisation. In this way, together we can make better and more flexible education and research possible.
So, universities, what’s stopping you? Certainly not the lack of a Digital University Act I hope!
(See also this earlier blog post, in Dutch.)