Peter Suber

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

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:
  • 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.
  • 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.

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 or so, my interests have centered on policies, practices, and technologies that foster research, especially those that foster the growth, sharing, reliability, use, 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

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.

Social media

  • 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 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. However, I saved many of them to the Internet Archive and nearly all of them to Conifer. See more details here.
    • In May 2020 I started a new blog on PubPub.

Related pages

  • My conflicts of interest.
    • This is the only place where I try to list the sources of my past and present funding.

Contacting me

I'm working remotely during the pandemic. No point calling my office phone number. Stay well.
  • 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. If you want to contact me by phone, text, Zoom, snail mail, or some other way, and don't want to go through the Office for Scholarly Communication, then send me an email and I'll tell you how. If you leave me voicemail, I may not hear it for months. If you send me a fax, or a direct message by social media, I may not see it at all.


"To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher."

     Pascal, Pensées.
     Trans. A.J. Krailsheimer, Penguin, 1966, §513

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