BILL ANALYSIS Ó Senate Appropriations Committee Fiscal Summary Senator Christine Kehoe, Chair SB 1053 (Steinberg) - California Digital Open Source Library Amended: April 19, 2012 Policy Vote: Education 7-0 Urgency: No Mandate: See staff comments Hearing Date: May 7, 2012 Consultant: Jacqueline Wong-Hernandez This bill meets the criteria for referral to the Suspense File. Bill Summary: SB 1053 establishes the California Open Source Digital Library (COSDL) for the purpose of housing open source materials. Fiscal Impact: Start-up costs likely in the low millions of dollars; on-going costs in excess of $1 million, annually. Exact costs will be determined by the choices made by the California Open Education Resources Council, which is given the authority to oversee the COSDL. Potentially substantial (on-going) reimbursable mandate on the California Community Colleges (CCCs); the system's participation is required, and CCCs are eligible to seek reimbursement for state-mandated activities. Background: This bill, in conjunction with SB 1052 (Steinberg), attempts to ameliorate the high costs college students in California's public postsecondary institutions pay for textbooks. It seeks to diminish the financial burden on students by requiring textbooks for the 50 most common lower division courses to be available on reserve at the campus library and by enabling instructional materials for those courses to be available through Open Education Resources (OER). OERs are educational materials such as textbooks, research articles, videos, assessments, or simulations that are either licensed under an open copyright license or are in the public domain. OERs provide no-cost access and permission to revise, reuse, remix, or redistribute the materials. The segments currently administer various digital collections, but none of the type envisioned in this bill. The University of SB 1053 (Steinberg) Page 1 California (UC) administers the California Digital Library which provides access to a digitized worldwide collection of research, books, journals, government publications and maps, allows faculty to publish articles and communicate with other scholars, but does not include textbooks and materials that are placed by faculty on reserve at the campus bookstore. The California State University (CSU) administers the Affordable Learning Solutions, which is a web-based system that houses Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT), the Digital Marketplace and other tools that enable faculty and students to search for free or low-cost materials and faculty to be recognized for work as well as communicate with other scholars. Current law authorizes the California Community Colleges to establish a pilot program to provide faculty with the information, methods and instructional materials to establish open education resources centers, but the program was stalled due to budget constraints. Proposed Law: This bill establishes the COSDL for the purpose of housing open source materials developed by the California Open Education Resources Council (COERC), as specified. It also requires that COSDL to be jointly administered by the CSU and CCC, (and requests that UC to also administer it), and that all material to bear a creative commons attribution license. Related Legislation: SB 1052 (Steinberg), which is currently on this Committee's Suspense File, is a companion bill which establishes the 9-member COERC which will be responsible for a variety of tasks geared toward reducing textbook costs for the 50 most widely taken lower division courses. Staff Comments: This bill requires CSU and the CCC, and requests the UC, to jointly establish and administer a new digital open source library that will house 50 lower division textbooks, determined by the COERC. This will incur substantial costs to CSU, as well as to the UC, if it chooses to participate. The UC has estimated that the bill would require, at a minimum, a modular textbook building/editing system, and a hosting infrastructure. The UC opines the cost to be approximately $900,000 to $1 million a year to create and maintain such a system. The exact costs would be determined by the functionality and system decisions made by COERC. It is unclear how costs would be shared among the segments. In addition to the system SB 1053 (Steinberg) Page 2 costs, each of the segments is likely to incur additional administrative costs to implement procedures for system operation and use by its students, as well as continued coordination with the other administrators. This bill requires the CCC to be a joint administrator. All CCC activities needed to implement the provisions of this bill, as well as any share of cost for the system, would likely be reimbursable to the CCCs as a new state mandate. This would be a direct cost to the General Fund.