Knowledge Unbound

This is the home page for my book, Knowledge Unbound: Selected Writings on Open Access, 2002–2011 (MIT Press, 2016).  Peter Suber.

About the book

The book was released in March 2016, and was OA from birth. MIT Press itself hosts three OA editions, in PDF, ePub and Mobi (Kindle). The PDF is also available in DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), and other places around the web.

I thank MIT Press for publishing the OA editions at the same time as the print editions, and for putting them all under CC-BY. I also thank Robert Darnton for his generous foreword.

The book manuscript was submitted in 2011, at almost the same time as the manuscript for my shorter book, Open Access (MIT Press, 2012). We decided to publish the shorter book first, and hold this collection until the first book had a chance to establish itself.

The date range in the subtitle was originally 2002-2010. Here's more than you want to know about why we changed it to 2002-2011 without changing the contents of the book. There's only one essay in the collection from 2011 (Open access for digitization projects). I published the first version in my newsletter in July 2009. Then I published a slightly revised version in a collection from the Nobel Foundation in 2011. I made the revisions in August 2009, but the revised version didn't appear until 2011. For the present book, I wanted to take advantage of those revisions. While we could have called the revised version a 2009 article, in the end we decided to call it a 2011 article.

Also see the book home page for my previous book, Open Access, MIT Press, 2012.

Both the book and this book home page are new, and I'm still thinking of the best way to use this book home page. I'd welcome your thoughts.

I don't plan to add the kinds of extensive updates and supplements that I added to my 2012 book, Open Access.

Earlier in planning the book with MIT Press, I was going to write a brief postscript of "second thoughts" for each article in the collection. But in the end we dropped the idea. The second thoughts would enlarge the book and force us to drop several of the articles themselves. However, I might add some of those second thoughts here. Stay tuned.

The book contains 44 articles, which is a fraction of what I've published on OA. One day I might use this page to list the articles I like best that didn't make it into this collection, from before and during the 2002-2011 period and from afterwards when they were too late to be considered. Meantime, see this nearly complete list of my writings on OA.