Peter Suber

From Peter Suber
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This is an experiment in a wiki-based home page. For now, it's my main home page. If I decide that the experiment is a failure, and shift to another page, I'll say so here and link to the new page.

General

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

Other current affiliations

Writings

  • My latest book is Open Access (MIT Press, 2012). It's available in paperback and at least eight OA editions (PDF, HTML, ePub, Mobi, Daisy, DjVu, plain text, and streaming). I keep it alive with frequent updates and supplements.
  • All my publications are available from my section of DASH (the Harvard open-access repository) or my Earlham web site.
    • In nearly all cases, there are full-text copies in DASH. In a few cases there are full-text copies at my Earlham site, but not yet in DASH, and in a few other cases there are full-text copies at neither location, but links to full-text copies from my Earlham site.
  • For my writings on the topic of open access (OA), see:
    • the bibliography of my writings on open access
    • the backfile of my newsletter (Free Online Scholarship Newsletter, March 2001 - September 2002, and SPARC Open Access Newsletter, July 2003 - June 2013)
    • the archive of my old blog, Open Access News (May 2002 - April 2010)
    • (I don't yet have a bibliography of my writings on topics other than OA. But the writings themselves are generally available in DASH or my Earlham site.)
  • Almost all of my publications are OA.
    • One exception is The Case of the Speluncean Explorers: Nine New Opinions (Routledge, 1998). I published it before I started thinking hard about OA. I've since 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 and the rights revert to me.
    • I believe that's the only exception. All my publications since I started working for OA in the late 1990's are OA. Except for Speluncean Explorers, all my publications for which I have digital copies are now OA. For a while there were a few early ones for which I didn't have digital copies. I've tried to find or create digital copies for each of those, and make each one OA, and I believe I've now succeeded. If I ever notice that I've missed one, I'll get to work on it.

Background and past affiliations

  • Until May 2003 I was a professor of philosophy at Earlham College, where I had taught since 1982. I also taught computer science and law. Although I have left full-time teaching, I am still a research professor at Earlham and still work full-time in the academic universe. My philosophical interests lie chiefly in the history of modern European philosophy, roughly from Montaigne to Nietzsche; Kant and Hegel; the history of western skepticism from Sextus Empiricus 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 liberty, paternalism, consent, and coercion; criminal law and tort law; and the philosophy of law. My current interests center on policies and technologies that foster research. Apart from the active promotion these policies and technologies, I want to understand how the internet has changed research and scholarly communication, how it ought to change them, and what it would mean to take full advantage of the internet for the creation and sharing of knowledge.

Related pages

  • My entire Earlham web site, including my courses, blog archive, and many of my publications, is preserved and annually refreshed at a section within Harvard's H-Sites. H-Sites will soon preserve and mirror the wiki of the Harvard Open Access Project and my personal wiki containing this home page.

Contacting me

  • My primary email addresses are peter_suber@harvard.edu and peter.suber@gmail.com.
    • I also use <psuber@cyber.law.harvard.edu>.
    • I no longer use <peters@earlham.edu> or <psuber@law.harvard.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, fax, 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 tweet me a message, I probably won't see it.


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

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