Open Access

The Internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience atvirtually no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work"open access": digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensingrestrictions. Open access is made possible by the Internet and copyright-holder consent, and manyauthors, musicians, filmmakers, and other creators who depend on royalties are understandablyunwilling to give their consent. But for 350 years, scholars have written peer-reviewed journalarticles for impact, not for money, and are free to consent to open access without losing revenue.

In this concise introduction, Peter Suber tells us what open access is and isn't,how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyrightproblems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold.Distilling a decade of Suber's influential writing and thinking about open access, this is theindispensable book on the subject for researchers, librarians, administrators, funders, publishers,and policy makers.

Peter Suber is Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, a Faculty Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Senior Researcher at SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). He is widely considered the de facto leader of the worldwide open access movement.