Knowledge Unbound

Peter Suber

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9780262029902
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Influential writings make the case for open access to research, explore its implications, and document the early struggles and successes of the open access movement. Peter Suber has been a leading advocate for open access since 2001 and has worked full time on issues of open access since 2003. As a professor of philosophy during the early days of the internet, he realized its power and potential as a medium for scholarship. As he writes now, "it was like an asteroid crash, fundamentally changing the environment, challenging dinosaurs to adapt, and challenging all of us to figure out whether we were dinosaurs." When Suber began putting his writings and course materials online for anyone to use for any purpose, he soon experienced the benefits of that wider exposure. In 2001, he started a newsletter—the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter, which later became the SPARC Open Access Newsletter—in which he explored the implications of open access for research and scholarship. This book offers a selection of some of Suber's most significant and influential writings on open access from 2002 to 2010. In these texts, Suber makes the case for open access to research; answers common questions, objections, and misunderstandings; analyzes policy issues; and documents the growth and evolution of open access during its most critical early decade.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Knowledge as a Public Good
• Open Access, Markets, and Missions
• What Is Open Access?
• Open Access Overview
• Removing the Barriers to Research: An Introduction to Open Access for Librarians
• The Taxpayer Argument for Open Access
• “It’s the Authors, Stupid!”
• Six Things That Researchers Need to Know about Open Access
• Trends Favoring Open Access
• Gratis and Libre Open Access
• More on the Case for Open Access
• The Scaling Argument
• Problems and Opportunities (Blizzards and Beauty)
• Open Access and the Self-Correction of Knowledge
• Open Access and the Last-Mile Problem for Knowledge
• Delivering Open Access
• The Case for OAI in the Age of Google
• Good Facts, Bad Predictions
• No-Fee Open-Access Journals
• Balancing Author and Publisher Rights
• Flipping a Journal to Open Access
• Society Publishers with Open Access Journals
• Ten Challenges for Open-Access Journals
• Funder and University Policies
• The Final Version of the NIH Public-Access Policy
• Another OA Mandate: The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006
• Twelve Reminders about FRPAA
• An Open Access Mandate for the NIH
• The Open Access Mandate at Harvard
• A Bill to Overturn the NIH Policy
• Open Access Policy Options for Funding Agencies and Universities
• Quality and Open Access
• Open Access and Quality
• Thinking about Prestige, Quality, and Open Access
• The Debate
• Not Napster for Science
• Two Distractions
• Praising Progress, Preserving Precision
• Who Should Control Access to Research Literature?
• Four Analogies to Clean Energy
• More on the Landscape of Open Access
• Promoting Open Access in the Humanities
• Helping Scholars and Helping Libraries
• Unbinding Knowledge: A Proposal for Providing Open Access to Past Research Articles, Starting with the Most Important
• Open Access to Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)
• Open Access for Digitization Projects
• Bits of the Bigger Picture
• Analogies and Precedents for the FOS Revolution
• Thoughts on First and Second-Order Scholarly Judgments
• Saving the Oodlehood and Shebangity of the Internet
• What’s the Ullage of Your Library?
• Can Search Tame the Wild Web? Can Open Access Help?
• Glossary
• Index