Tracking and Rewarding the Use of Intellectual Property

Educators will use Paideia to announce the publication of open educational resources and record the references they used. This would allow for notarization of the date of publication for copyright reasons, as well as allow the level of re-use of any specific resource to be tracked.

From a structural standpoint, this scenario is very similar to the existing system used to track citations for journal articles. However, tracking citations of journal articles has up until now required intermediaries which have put limits on the use of those articles in return for those services. These limits often include high costs for access and restrictions on the sharing and use of the intellectual property within them. This has limited uptake of the model for open educational resources. Using Paideia, we eliminate the intermediary, thus allowing anyone to publish openly, and accurately keep track of re-use without putting limitations on the source material.

With such a system introduced, it would allow for teachers to be rewarded based on the level of actual use and re-use of their teaching materials, similar to how they are rewarded based on citations to research papers. By serving as a proxy for quality materials, it would also allow students and institutions to make metrics-based decisions on which teaching materials to use.