FREEDOM OF
TECHNICAL INFORMATION

Engineering Integrity Society

An expanded version of an article in EIS News, December 2006 prepared by Dr Frank Sherratt.

Background

Space in the newsletter is more limited than space on our website. This version has added Appendices B and C, giving more information about using the MIT Open Courseware site. It has also been circulated to EIS Council members for their comments.

Text

We hear a lot about revolutions these days, and the “IT” revolution is one of them. We also know that the publicity for any of these revolutions often has a commercial ring about it, with a strong “must have” element describing the latest product. IT is no exception, but we have to admit that in the last ten years or so it has substantially changed the way we live and work. As a society the EIS puts a lot of effort into producing and disseminating information, and our decisions must take proper account of changes in the IT world. Some of these changes may also be relevant to the professional lives of members, and it is useful to report some of the ways our committees are thinking.

Two recent events are relevant. Our Journal recently joined the search engine Ingenta, and Council at its last meeting agreed a copyright change for the Journal. A full description of the first event is in Joseph Giacomin’s editorial in the September Journal. If you use Ingenta to search for information about a technical subject it will often refer you to an article in a learned journal, and ours is now included. You may then be offered electronic copy to download for a fee, typically about $30 to $50. The difference in the case of the EIS Journal is that downloading is free. If you then look at our new copyright declaration you will find that you are allowed unlimited copying of the article for educational purposes.

These developments are only the latest steps in a policy which the Society has followed for years. We make very little revenue from selling information per se, but we do make profit from meetings. If we give away too much information people may stop coming to our meetings, but if we give none away we will sink into obscurity. A familiar dilemma.

The Society must consider what is happening in the rest of the world, of course, and the answer is a great deal, obviously too much for a single article. Probably one of the most significant in the educational field is the MIT Open Courseware initiative, which started in 2001. MIT are attempting to make a substantial part of their teaching support material in many subjects available electronically without charge and for unlimited educational use. Log on to ocw.mit.edu to get involved. Subjects relevant to us include Aeronautical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Material Science, Mathematics and Nuclear Engineering. A brief look at the site turns up some useful information for educationists, but not a full set of self-instruction manuals, and the policy statement for the enterprise makes it clear that this is not the target. The site is aimed at being fully operational by 2008, followed by steady development. Appendix A gives two examples of how to use it.

Organisations like the UK's Open University and the National Technological University in the USA use electronic distribution extensively, and provide excellent material for a fee, but they have not in the past provided free technical information as the EIS is now doing. Single articles given away by individuals are also plentiful on the internet, but their reliability must be doubtful. A major development occurred in March this year, when the OU announced a large grant from a US charity which effectively allows it to follow the MIT initiative. Material will be released in two categories, one for self-instruction and one for instructors. Some documents are already available, but not enough to compare this development with the MIT one. A more useful precedent is the Dissemination of IT for the Promotion of Materials Science initiative (DoITPoMS) at Cambridge University (www.doitpoms.ac.uk), which provides a range of well-developed packages for teaching and self-instruction. Downloading is free, and the copyright declaration allows unlimited reproduction for teaching purposes. Similar initiatives with different objectives exist at Bristol, Liverpool , Plymouth and other universities.

There are many free and fee-paying electronic information systems world wide, but the development considered here is slightly different. We have started, as a learned society, to allow high quality information for which we own the copyright to be downloaded free from the Internet. We are allowing that information to be reproduced without limit for educational purposes. This is a relatively new trend for owners of copyright in this sort of information, but we seem to be in good company.

Frank Sherratt

Appendix A Using the MIT Open Courseware facility.

Example 1: Simple search for a single item on equations for stress transformation.

The result is a five page description of the topic, which can be printed.

Example 2: Search for a complete lecture course on modelling and simulation

Other courses offer lecture material in less finished formats, for instance hand-written notes, and sometimes diagrams or similar items are omitted for copyright reasons. Overall, though, the source provides a lot of data in a very useable form.

Other courses offer lecture material in less finished formats, for instance hand-written notes, and sometimes diagrams or similar items are omitted for copyright reasons. Appendix B gives information about thirty of the courses. If you can contribute more to this list please send the information to franksherratt@hotmail.com.

Appendix B. A sample of engineering courses available from www.ocw.mit.edu.

This article is a modified version of one in the December Newsletter, 2006. Because space is less limited on the web we can add more material about courses from the MIT Open Coursework initiative. This appendix and Appendix C are the result.

The way to access the files listed below is described in Appendix A above. When dealing with the complete list of courses on the site it is helpful to know that:-

(1) The title page for each course has the course name and the codes for all the Departmental courses using those lectures. "Introduction to Modelling and Simulation", used as an example in Appendix A, is, for instance, numbered 22.00J/1.021J/2.030J/3.021J/10.333J/18.361J/HST.583J, indicating that students from seven departments are offered that set of lectures.

(2) When you search the database after choosing a department, you will be offered a course under the code appropriate for that department. 1.021J is "Modelling and Simulation" for the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, and 2.030J is "Modelling and Simulation" for Mechanical Engineering. Both codes will take you to the same data, numbered 22.00J/1.02J/----------------/HST583J.

(3) If you are curious about the departmental identity, 1. is Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2. is Mechanical Engineering, 3. is Materials Science, 6. is Electrical Engineering, 10. is Chemical Engineering, 16. is Aeronautics and Astronautics, 18. is Mathematics and 22. is Nuclear Science and Engineering.

The courses below were investigated for a different project, the general field being mechanical integrity. The purpose of giving the list here is to provide some idea of the range and comprehensiveness of the material which can be accessed, and what information is obtaining by clicking on 'lectures' or 'assignments' in the "Highlights" section

One detail, a .pdf file is a portable data file, usually created by Adobe Acrobat, and readable by the free Acrobat reader.

Selected courses and some attributes.

Appendix C - Example of use of the Open Coursework files.

The Open Courseware files can be used to supplement other data. The EIS publishes downloadable files on its website, like the ones on "A practical introduction to fatigue" and "Predicting fatigue life from frequency domain data" available at present. A few years ago we had "Fatigue life estimation", and this is still available on request to the secretary. The MIT Open Courseware site has a great deal of information on the mechanical behaviour of materials, which can be used to supplement these EIS articles. There are many files on fundamental dislocation theory, for instance. Concentrating more on the engineering design side, three useful sources are:-

2.002 Materials and Mechanics 2
Lecture 18 Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics (LEFM)
Lecture 21 Defect-free Fatigue (effectively local-strain-analysis)
Lecture 20 Fatigue crack propagation
17_ex_rob and 22_ex_prob are problems in LEFM and Local Strain respectively

3.11 Mechanics of Materials
Module: Yield and Fracture
.pdf Fatigue
Introduction to Fracture Mechanics
Statistics of Fracture
Yield and Plastic Flow

Module Tensile Response of Materials
Stress-strain Curves

Module General Concepts of Stress and Strain
Transformation of Stressses and Strains

Module General Stress Analysis
Closed-form Solutions
Experimental Solutions
Finite Element Analysis

3.35 Fracture and Fatigue

Many of the files from all three courses are substantial texts, containing more detail than the EIS articles.

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