Open Access Proponent Peter Suber, Briefly Profiled

The open-access proponent works to increase the flow of scholarly information.

Peter Suber

Peter Suber’s life bridges multiple places, passions, and positions. He has cycled across America, scooted around Sweden on a Vespa, and voyaged to Antarctica with a boatful of polar biologists who were conducting a penguin census. Now, he juggles a family life in Maine and a professional calling in Cambridge. At Harvard, he serves simultaneously as director of the Office for Scholarly Communication (an arm of the library system) and director of Harvard’s Open Access Project (sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society). Both offices advance the cause of open access, a movement to provide scholarly work to the Internet-going public free of charge. Suber’s interest in open access ignited when, in the early days of the Internet, he began republishing his own scholarly work in philosophy on his personal website. The reaction surprised and invigorated him: his experiment of freely sharing his work online gained more readers, and more engagement, than his official publications did. “What started as a geeky excuse to play with HTML,” he says, “turned into the realization that the Web was a serious medium for scholarship.” Ever since, he has worked to fix an academic-publishing environment he believes is broken: that doesn’t reach the readership it should, or could, because it erects, maintains, and jealously polices barriers to scholarly information (see “The ‘Wild West’ of Academic Publishing”). The journey has led to his recent full-time, double-duty appointment. In his office, a particularly important photograph hangs on the wall. One of his daughters took it for a photography-class assignment about “Objects of Desire.” It depicts books. Some are closed, and some, much to Suber’s delight, lie open.

Related topics

You might also like

In Sermon, Garber Urges Harvard Community to ‘Defend and Protect’ Institutions

Harvard’s president uses traditional Memorial Church address to encourage divergent views.

How Do Single-Celled Organisms Learn and Remember

A Harvard neuroscientist’s quest to model memory in single-celled organisms

A New Narrative of Civil Rights

Political philosopher Brandon Terry’s vision of racial progress

Most popular

What Trump Means for John Roberts’s Legacy

Executive power is on the docket at the Supreme Court.

Harvard Layoffs Continue, with More to Come

In the wake of federal government actions, several Harvard schools and institutes are cutting costs.

Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival

Without Christopher Marlowe, there might not have been a Bard.

Explore More From Current Issue

Two women in traditional kimonos, one lighting a cigarette, in a scene from Apart from You.

Harvard Film Archive Spotlights Japanese Director Mikio Naruse

A retrospective of the filmmaker’s works, from Floating Clouds to Flowing

Renaissance portrait of young man thought to be Christoper Marlowe with light beard, wearing ornate black coat with gold buttons and red patterns.

Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival

Without Christopher Marlowe, there might not have been a Bard.

Student walking under bright stage lights shaped like smartphones displaying social media apps.

Two Years of Doxxing at Harvard

What happens when students are publicly named and shamed for their views?