Harvard Portrait: Peter Suber

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

This Astronomer is Sounding a Warning on 'Space Junk'

As debris accumulates in low Earth orbit, the danger of destructive collisions continues to rise.

Isaac Kohlberg to Step Down as Head of Harvard Technology Development

Partnerships and licensing office could become more critical as funding cuts loom

The Professor Who Quantified Democracy

Erica Chenoweth’s data shows how—and when—authoritarians fall.

Most popular

Hold the Fries

Baked, boiled, and mashed potatoes are better.

The Latest In Harvard’s Fight with the Trump Administration

Back-and-forth reports on settlement talks, new accusations from the government, and a reshuffling of two federal compliance offices

The School of Public Health, Facing a Financial Reckoning, Seizes the Chance to Reinvent Itself

Dean Andrea Baccarelli plans for a smaller, more impactful Chan School of 2030.

Explore More From Current Issue

A woman and a horse jump off a large platform into water

Scrapbooking a woman who rode horses into the sea

A crowd of people shout and march during a nighttime demonstration, while a man and woman in the foreground hold two silver-colored pans above their heads and bang on them with sticks

Erica Chenoweth’s data shows how—and when—authoritarians fall.

An illustration of a green leaf being hit by a beam of light and bouncing off the leaf and then becoming a color prisim

Light-based analysis of botanical collections link plants to Earth’s changing climate.