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 came out in March 2016, and was OA from birth under a CC-BY license. MIT Press itself hosts four OA editions, in PDF, HTML, ePub and Mobi (Kindle). The same editions are also available in DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), and other places around the web. The Internet Archive adds seven more OA editions, in ABBYY GZ, Daisy, DjVu, plain text, Single page processed JP2 zip, streaming, and Torrent.

I thank MIT Press for publishing the OA editions at the same time as the print editions, and putting them all under CC-BY. I also thank Margy Avery for inviting me to put this book together and Bob 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.

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

The book is new, and I'm still thinking about 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. However, earlier in planning with MIT Press, I thought about writing a postscript of "second thoughts" for each piece 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 primary articles themselves. However, I might add some of those second thoughts here. Stay tuned.

The book contains 44 articles, which is about a quarter of the articles I've published on OA. One day I might use this page to point to some I like best that didn't make it into this collection. Meantime, see this pretty complete list of my writings on OA.