Peter Suber

This wiki page has been my main home page since June 2013.

• Short URL for this page = bit.ly/petersuber

My work and primary affiliations

• I work for the free circulation of knowledge and research in every field and region. In practice that means education, collaboration, research, writing, tool-building, direct assistance, and pro bono consulting for open access. I wear two hats:
  • Senior Advisor on Open Access (in Harvard Library).
  • Director of the Harvard Open Access Project (in the Berkman Klein Center)

• I'm a few steps into phased retirement.

• My primary field is philosophy (Ph.D., Northwestern University, 1978). I'm also a non-practicing lawyer (J.D., Northwestern, 1982).

Writings

 

My latest book is Knowledge Unbound (MIT Press, 2016). It's available in paperback, hardback, and many open-access editions (same text, different file formats).

 

My last book before that is Open Access (MIT Press, 2012). It's available in paperback and many open-access editions (same text, different file formats). I keep it alive with frequent updates and supplements. Choice named Open Access an Outstanding Academic Title for 2013.

• On open access
  • See the bibliography of my writings on open access (with links to OA editions).
  • See the backfile of my newsletter (Free Online Scholarship Newsletter, 2001-2002, and SPARC Open Access Newsletter, 2003-2013)
  • See the archive of my old blog, Open Access News (2002-2010).
  • See how my projects and writings could help those studying the history of OA

• On topics other than open access
  • See the bibliography of my writings (with links to OA editions).

• Nearly all my publications are open access from my section of DASH (the Harvard open-access repository), my old Earlham web site, a publisher's site, or some combination of these.
  • One kind of exception is an older, print-only publication for which I don't yet have a digital edition. Over the years I've gradually created digital editions where I didn't have them, and I'm nearly done.
  • Another kind of exception is a work for which I have a digital edition but not permission for open access. The only exception of this kind is The Case of the Speluncean Explorers: Nine New Opinions (Routledge, 1998). I published it before I started thinking hard about OA. I've asked Routledge to make the book OA, but it declined. I'm still willing to do so as soon as Routledge is. If Routledge doesn't make it OA while the book is still in print, then I'll make it OA as soon is it goes out of print, or as soon as I can revert the rights, whichever comes first.

• Also see the section on social media below.

Academic interests

• When I was a philosophy prof (1982-2003), I specialized in Kant and German idealism; the history of modern European philosophy, roughly from Montaigne to Nietzsche; the history of western skepticism from Socrates to the 20th century; epistemological and ethical issues related to skepticism, such as fictionalism, ideology, self-deception, and the ethics of belief; the logical, epistemological, ethical, and legal problems of self-reference; the metatheory of first-order logic; the ethics of paternalism, consent, and coercion; and the philosophy of law. I retain an interest in all these topics, and have since added some new ones: the connections between ancient Greek skepticism and Indian Buddhism (via Pyrrho), the naturalization of ethics, and concepts of randomness.

• Since 2001 my interests have centered on policies, practices, and technologies that foster research, especially those that foster open access to research and the growth, quality, use, reuse, and usefulness of research. In addition to promoting these policies, practices, and technologies, I want to understand how the internet has changed research, how it ought to change research, and what it would mean to take full advantage of the internet for research.

Other current affiliations

• Here are some affiliations other than the primary affiliations above (most recent first):
  • Advisor to Coursetexts.
  • Member of the steering committee of the BOAI Organization.
  • Member of the Advisory Board of the ARC Alliance.
  • Member of the Steering Committee of the Open Climate Campaign (OCC).
  • Strategist for Incentivizing Collaborative and Open Research (ICOR).
  • Member of the Advisory Committee of the Free Journal Network (FJN).
  • Member of the Editorial Board of the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review
  • Member of the Open 2020 Working Group
  • Member of the Advisory Board of Project Aiur
  • Member of the Advisory Committee for the study, Characterizing the Adoption of ORCID iDs in Academic Communities
  • External Expert for OpenMinTeD, in the Working Group on intellectual property rights and licensing
  • Member of the Advisory Board of Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO)
  • Founding member of the Authors Alliance
  • Member of the Joint Working Group of SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE)
  • Member of the Academic Steering & Advocacy Committee of the Open Library of Humanities (OLH)
  • Member of the Advisory Board of the Open Syllabus Project (OSP)
  • Member of the Board of Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS)
  • Member of the Editorial Board of the Open Access Directory (OAD)
  • Member of the Steering Committee of the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS)
  • Member of the Advisory Council of the Open Knowledge Foundation, and the Advisory Council for its Open Definition
  • Member of the SPARC Open Access Working Group
  • Member of the New Knot Claims Assessment Committee of the International Guild of Knot Tyers
  • Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Earlham College

• Also:
  • Co-founder of the Harvard Open Data Assistance Program (ODAP), with Mercè Crosas, 2014
  • Co-developer of TagTeam, 2011
  • Founder of the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP), 2011
  • Founder of the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP), 2009
  • Co-founder of the Open Access Directory (OAD), with Robin Peek, 2008
  • Co-founder of the Societies and Open Access Research (SOAR) project, with Caroline Sutton, 2007
  • Principal drafter of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002), the BOAI 10 year anniversary statement (September 2012), and the BOAI 20 year anniversary statement (March 2022).
  • Creator of Nomic, 1982

Background and past affiliations

• I was a professor of philosophy at Earlham College for 21 years (1982-2003). I also taught computer science and law. When I stepped down in 2003 to work full-time on OA, I was a tenured senior professor. I'm now a professor emeritus.

• Past affiliations (most recent first)
  • Member of the Advisory Council of the Library Partnership Certification project (LPC).
  • Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication
  • Member of the Review Committee for the International Science Council (ISC), for its March 2021 report on Opening the Record of Science.
  • Member of the Board of the Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA)
  • Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
  • Member of the Advisory Board of the Open Access Publishing Cooperative Study
  • Member of the Advisory Board of OneRepo
  • Member of the Advisory Board of the Harvard Open Data Assistance Program (ODAP)
  • Member of the Advisory Board of ScienceOpen
  • Member of the Library Steering Committee of Knowledge Unlatched (KU)
  • Member of the Advisory Panel of the HEFCE monographs and open access project
  • Member of the Editorial Board of Publications
  • Fellow at the OpenForum Academy
  • Member of the Advisory Group of the SPARC Campus Open Access Policies project
  • Faculty Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, 2009-2015.
  • Member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Scholarly and Research Communication
  • Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project (ISP) of Yale Law School
  • Member of the Advisory Board of The European Library
  • Member of the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation
  • Member of the Editorial Board of Open Access Research
  • Member of the Board of Directors of The Center For Internet Research
  • Member of the External Graduate Faculty of University of Maine
  • Member of the Advisory Board of JournalReview.
  • Member of the Advisory Committee of the Text Outline Project
  • Member of the Advisory Group of the Open Access to Knowledge Law Project
  • Member of the Scientific Committee of Open Culture
  • Member of the OA Advisory Board of Open Humanities Press
  • Member of the Journal Article Versions Review Group of the NISO/ALPSP Journal Article Versions Working Group.
  • Member of the Advisory Committee of the Commons of Geographic Data
  • Member of the Publishing Working Group for Science Commons
  • Member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the book series on Open Access published by Polimetrica
  • Member of the Advisory Board of Academic Commons
  • Member of the Steering Committee of the Scientific Information Working Group of the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society
  • Member of the Advisory Board of the Information Commons of the American Library Association
  • Director of the Open Access Project at Public Knowledge
  • Moderator of the SPARC Open Access Forum (SOAF)
  • Author of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN) (formerly the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter)
  • Senior Researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
  • Author and editor of the Open Access News blog (OAN)
  • Member of the Board of Directors of the Bagaduce Watershed Association
  • Member of the Board of Governors of the International Consortium For The Advancement of Academic Publication
  • Moderator of the BOAI Forum
  • Affiliate of the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University.
  • Editorial consultant to Noesis: Philosophical Research Online
  • Member of the Executive Committee of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy and co-editor of its Virtual Library of Philosophy
  • Senior Researcher at Noetic Laboratories
  • Co-Editor of Noesis: Philosophical Research On-Line
  • General Editor of Hippias, The Limited-Area Search Engine for Philosophy

Social media

• On Mastodon I'm @petersuber@fediscience.org.
  • Most of my social-media activity is on Mastodon these days.
  • To read or follow my Mastodon posts without a Mastodon account, use the HTML version, the RSS feed, the Bluesky bridge account, or another non-Mastodon platform interoperable with Mastodon through the fediverse.

• On Bluesky I'm @petersuber.bsky.social (direct account) and @petersuber.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy (Bluesky bridge to my Mastodon account). Still just experimenting.

• On Friendica I'm @petersuber@social.trom.tf. Still just experimenting

• On X/Twitter I'm @petersuber. I stopped regular posting when Elon Musk took over in late 2022.
  • I'm not deleting my account for two reasons. First, most of my posts are about open access and scholarly communication. I wrote them to inform and influence the OA movement and hope they might still be useful. Second, I don't want to let a troll pick up my username.
  • If the account disappears, try this (imperfect) Archive-It archive of it. Much of it is also backed up in the Internet Archive.

• Blogging
  • From May 2002 to April 2010, I blogged heavily at Open Access News, about 18,000 posts over 8 years, with occasional blogging partners. OAN was my attempt to stay on top of all that was happening with OA and share what I learned. It was useful while it lasted, but it didn't scale with the growth of OA. That failure to scale led me to launch the crowd-sourced, tag-based Open Access Tracking Project in 2009, and lay down my blog about a year later. I explained why I was making the transition in a May 2009 article in my newsletter. OAN is preserved and searchable in several places, including Archive-It and the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. See more details here.
  • From July 2011 to April 2019, I blogged lightly at Google+, about 1,200 posts over 8 years. Google pulled the plug on G+ in April 2019 and deleted all the posts. Here's an (imperfect) Archive-It archive of my posts. I also saved many posts to the Internet Archive and nearly all of them to Conifer. Here's a subset of them. More details here.
  • In May 2020 I started a new blog on PubPub. But I seldom post.

Related pages

• Harvard Library profile.
• Berkman Klein Center profile.
• Wikipedia profile
• Wikidata profile
• Possum ID.
• Scholia profile
• ORCID profile. My ORCID = 0000-0002-3577-2890.
• ISNI profile. My ISNI ID = 0000 0000 3579 6302.
• VIAF profile. My VIAF ID = 41863008.
• Google Scholar profile.
• Mastodon Academic profile.
• Earlham College home page. Mostly superseded by the present home page.
• Curriculum vitae. Abridged and dated. Contact me if you need an unabridged and updated version.
• My conflicts of interest. This is the only place where I try to list the sources of my past and present funding.
• Harvard University Archives preserves several of my web sites:
  • One section preserves my Earlham College web site, including my course pages, blog archive, and many of my publications. (I believe that all of my publications on this site are now also in DASH.)
  • A second section preserves my personal wiki at the Berkman Klein Center, including this wiki-based home page.
  • A third section preserves the site of the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP) at the Berkman Klein Center.

Contacting me

• My primary email addresses are peter_suber@harvard.edu and peter.suber@gmail.com.
  • I also use <psuber@cyber.law.harvard.edu> and <peter_suber@g.harvard.edu>.
  • I'm phasing out <psuber@law.harvard.edu>, <psuber@cyber.harvard.edu>, and <peters@earlham.edu>. If you have them in your address book, please replace them with one of the above.

• Email is the best way to reach me. To contact me by phone, text, Zoom, snail mail, or some other way, send me an email and I'll tell you how.

• All my Harvard work is now remote. It's no longer possible to meet F2F in Cambridge, call me at an office phone number, or send me snail mail to a campus address.

"To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher."      Pascal, Pensées.      Trans. A.J. Krailsheimer, Penguin, 1966, §513