Information Technology Planning Board
Meeting Summary
Thursday – November 1, 2007
10:00 a.m. to Noon
11348 Young Research Library
www.itpb.ucla.edu

ITPB Attendees:  Christine Borgman, Alfonso Cardenas, Mitch Creem, Jim Davis, Xue Hua, Bill Jepson, David Kaplan, Kathleen Komar,  Sam Morabito, Warren Mori, Marilyn Raphael, Alan Robinson, Michael Schill, Gary Strong 
Guests:  Larry Loeher, Nick Reddingius, Michael Schilling, Kent Wada, Don Worth

Alfonso Cardenas introduced new member Marilyn Raphael.

Agenda Item 1:  Summary of IT Priorities and Working Groups for 2007-08

Alfonso Cardenas presented the results of the prioritization votes submitted by members in response to the topics introduced at the July 2007 ITPB Retreat.  The ITPB will address these issues in 2007-08:

Working Groups have been formed around each of these topics.  UCLA staff and faculty who are not members of ITPB but who may possess insight into particular topics have been included in the groups.

Agenda Item 2:  Campus Research and Education Data Management

Christine Borgman reviewed the main issues that were presented at the ITPB Retreat in July to determine if they are still pertinent and relevant.  The goal is to frame what is important in this area in order to build an action plan that can be used to guide the working group.

Scholarly Information Infrastructure Model

The focus is on the content level that includes the educational data (i.e., digital libraries, performance data, teaching modules and products).  There is great interest in building new infrastructures to support scholarship that is information-intensive, data-intensive, distributed, collaborative and multi-disciplinary.  Similar infrastructures to support education and learning are also being explored.  The goal is to use technology to gain better access to the content, manage the data deluge, leverage data as a form of scholarly capital and to conduct computationally intensive research.

Historically, journals were the end product of research and data was discarded.  There has been a change in the policy of funding agencies that now view the data as a form of scholarly capital that is to be kept, stored, and reused.  The driving forces are the technology that has developed to a point where this type of infrastructure can exist and the collaborations that are sought to share these distributed resources and to create virtual organizations.  In the larger framework, the goal is to link the content (documents, data, composite objects) together across boundaries (repositories, publisher databases, disciplines, countries).  Standards work is being done to build bridges from the publication to where the data is stored; examples of standards that link content are Open URL and the Open Archives Initiative.

The Open Access Movement
One of the drivers of the Open Access Movement is the greater expense to libraries to purchase or lease access to content and associated limitations on access. Another driver is the ease of self-archiving publications and working documents in institutional repositories or on personal websites  There is support for the idea that once published, both the publication and data should be made widely available.  Data are being seen not only as a way to replicate findings, but also as a way to ask new questions.  The sciences, social sciences and humanities are interested in data mining and using the data in large models.

Policy Environment
The policy issues tend to focus on publicly funded research.  As a public university our intent is to make materials published or created by our faculty and research community widely available. Policies in Europe tend toward publications and data from EU–funded research being publicly available at the end of any given project.  The NIH Open Access bill to deposit publications resulting from NIH funded research into PubMed Central passed both houses of Congress. 

Discussion Points:

A number of specific issues and concerns were identified for further discussion

Agenda Item 3:  Intellectual Property and the CCLE

Gary Strong presented an overview of the issues facing the University in terms of the intellectual property and the impact that it has on faculty, students and researchers.
 
There are four main factors that need to be taken into consideration when addressing the issue of intellectual property with respect to sharing learning content:

  1. Nearly everything is a copy

    The digital environment has changed everything in relation to intellectual property because in the digital environment everything is a copy of an original work in some form, whether it is information obtained online or content in a PowerPoint presentation for a class.  To use content from another work is to make a copy.  Copyrights control the use of copies and in the digital environment nearly everything we do is a copy.

  2. Not all access is created equal

    There has been a shift in scholarly publishing from ownership of material to licensing access to content.  Increasingly, rather than being protected under broad copyright law and the principle of fair use, the rights to use publications are being governed by contract and commercial laws.   This shift has created a very complex scenario:  an increasing number of journals are only available through licenses; there are an increasing number of digitized books, each of which has very different rights and restrictions associated with them.

  3. Changes to copyright law

    The expanded scope of U.S. and international copyright law is now life plus 70 years.  Originally copyright protection was for 14 years.  In 1989, the law changed to eliminate the copyright notice requirement.  The absence of a notice of copyright (c in a circle) does not indicate the lack of copyright protection; there is automatic protection.

  4. Restricted access and payment for use

    Increased litigation related to copyright and other intellectual property issues is problematic for the University.  There is increasing pressure from content owners in academic institutions to restrict access and to pay use fees to the content owners.  The Association of American Publishers (AAP) is a proponent of this effort, sending protest letters to UCSD and forcing Cornell University to revise its electronic reserves and course management systems to severely limit what can be included in those systems without payment.

Issues & Concerns

A number of specific issues and concerns were identified for further discussion.

Agenda Item 4:  Reports

CENIC-Internet 2 Merger Update (Jim Davis)

The merger between CENIC and Internet2 was voted down.  The major issue of contention was the transfer of fiber assets.

CITI Prioritization Process Overview (Jim Davis)

Results of the CITI Prioritization Process.  The prioritization was informed by the cost of the projects but not driven by the costs; it was focused on the need and value to the campus. The top six projects recommended to go into funding discussions are:

  1. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) – legacy system replacement
  2. Common Collaborative & Learning Environment (CCLE)
  3. Integrated Web Experience (IWE) – brings together the business websites that students and parents use
  4. Disaster Recovery Expansion
  5. Enterprise Directory & Identity Management – authenticates and authorizes people to use the University systems
  6. Financial System Upgrades – extends the life of the legacy systems

If additional funding is available, funding discussions will include:

  1. Platform Architecture Upgrades
  2. Human Resource Information System (HRIS)

The CITI prioritization process raised organizational and philosophical issues regarding the need for a formal mechanism to provide permanent funding for campus-wide projects that affect many departments’ long-term projects.  There currently is no organized methodology for setting out permanent funding for infrastructure needs.  CITI will address the development of an approach for funding campus-wide and long-term IT projects.

The meeting was adjourned at 12:02 p.m.