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.