Open Access (book)

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  • These are Peter Suber's supplements and updates to his book, Open Access: Research Unbound, MIT Press, 2012.


The book

  • ///here give links to MIT, Amazon, etc.; explain when/how it will become OA
  • The text was finished in the spring of 2011, with only one or two small updates inserted after that.
  • The word count is 147k, higher than MIT wanted. In many places I was constrained by the word count. For example, in the preface, I wanted to thank many more colleagues, but in the end I only thanked those who helped with economic support for my OA work.
  • Don't criticize MIT Press for not capitalizing the word "internet". The house style was to capitalize it. I insisted that it be decapitalized.
  • In most of my other writing about OA, I use the acronyms "OA" ("open access") and "TA" ("toll access") freely. But MIT didn't want too many acronyms in the text and suggested that we spell out "toll access". I agreed. But the result is that many sentences lack stylistic symmetry by contrasting open access (using "OA" the acronym) with toll access (using "toll access" the phrase).

Updates

  • Elsevier boycott

Second thoughts

  • Or: Notes toward the second edition
  • I call OA a "revolution" but say it's not a "radical" idea. What's not a radical step is to (1) solving severe problems harming you and your work by (2) taking advantage of existing technology.

Reader suggestion page

  • have one? use another format instead, such as my G+ blog? find some way to gather suggestions; describe and link to it here

Crowdsourced index

  • good index but we can improve it; first draft by MIT; published version extensively revised by me; but still a lot of room for improvement
  • large, so put it on another page; link to it from here; explain here and there that most HOAP wiki pages are editable only by project participants, but that the book index page is editable by any registered user