Peter Suber

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title: "Peter Suber" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["1951-births", "access-to-knowledge-activists", "american-bloggers", "21st-century-american-philosophers", "american-stand-up-comedians", "berkman-fellows", "living-people", "open-access-activists", "copyright-activists", "copyright-scholars", "people-from-highland-park,-illinois", "people-from-brooksville,-maine", "earlham-college-alumni", "earlham-college-faculty", "highland-park-high-school-(illinois)-alumni", "northwestern-university-alumni", "northwestern-university-pritzker-school-of-law-alumni", "wikimedia-foundation-advisory-board-members", "articles-containing-video-clips", "comedians-from-evanston,-illinois", "scholarly-communication", "21st-century-american-non-fiction-writers", "21st-century-american-comedians", "american-male-comedians"] description: "American philosopher and open access advocate" topic_path: "law" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Suber" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary American philosopher and open access advocate ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox scientist"]

Field	Value
name	Peter Suber
image	Peter-Suber8.jpg
caption	Suber in 2009
birth_date
birth_place	Evanston, Illinois, U.S.
death_date
resting_place_coordinates
fields	Open access
Philosophy
Ethics
Logic
workplaces	Northwestern University
Earlham College
Harvard University
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Wikimedia Foundation
Open Knowledge Foundation
Public Knowledge
alma_mater	Earlham College (BA)
Northwestern University (MA, PhD, JD)
thesis_title	Kierkegaard's Concept of Irony especially in relation to Freedom, Personality and Dialectic
thesis_url	https://www.proquest.com/docview/302891187
thesis_year	1978
doctoral_advisor	William A. Earle
known_for	Nomic
Open access
Budapest Open Access Initiative
awards	Lyman Ray Patterson Copyright Award (2011)
signature
website

| | spouse | Liffey Thorpe | ::

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| footnotes = | spouse = Liffey Thorpe | children = Peter Dain Suber (born November 8, 1951) is an American philosopher specializing in the philosophy of law and open access to knowledge. He is a Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP). Suber is known as a leading voice in the open access movement, and as the creator of the game Nomic.

Education

Suber graduated from Earlham College in 1973, received a PhD degree in philosophy in 1978, writing a dissertation on Søren Kierkegaard and a Juris Doctor degree in 1982, both from Northwestern University.

Career

Previously, Suber was senior research professor of philosophy at Earlham College, the open access project director at Public Knowledge, a senior researcher at Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). He is a member of the Board of Enabling Open Scholarship, the Advisory Boards at the Wikimedia Foundation, the Open Knowledge Foundation, and the advisory boards of other organizations devoted to open access and an information commons.

Suber worked as a stand-up comic from 1976 to 1981, including an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1976. Suber returned to Earlham College as a professor from 1982 to 2003 where he taught classes on philosophy, law, logic, and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, among other topics. In 1997, he launched Hippias (later Noesis), a peer-reviewed search engine for the field of philosophy.

Suber participated in the 2001 meeting that led to the world's first major international open access initiative, the Budapest Open Access Initiative. He wrote Open Access News and the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, considered the most authoritative blog and newsletter on open access. He is also the founder of the Open Access Tracking Project, and co-founder, with Robin Peek, of the Open Access Directory.

In philosophy, Suber is the author of The Paradox of Self-Amendment, the first book-length study of self-referential paradoxes in law, and The Case of the Speluncean Explorers: Nine New Opinions, the first book-length "rehearing" of Lon Fuller's classic, fictional case. He has also written many articles on self-reference, ethics, formal and informal logic, the philosophy of law, and the history of philosophy.

He has written many articles on open access to science and scholarship. His 2012 book, Open Access, was published by MIT Press and released under a Creative Commons license. His latest book is a collection of 44 of his most influential articles about open access, Knowledge Unbound: Selected Writings on Open Access, 2002–2010, also published by MIT Press under a Creative Commons license.

Suber has directed the development of TagTeam since its start in 2011. TagTeam is an open-source, social-tagging platform developed for the Harvard Open Access Project at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Honours and awards

Lingua Franca magazine named Suber one of Academia's 20 Most Wired Faculty in 1999. Readers of The Charleston Advisor gave him a special Readers' Choice Award in October 2006, "Non-Librarian Working for Our Cause." The American Library Association named him the winner of the Lyman Ray Patterson Copyright Award for 2011. Choice named his book on Open Access "an Outstanding Academic Title for 2013."

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Peter_Suber_at_BOAI-10.ogv" caption="Peter Suber at the 10th anniversary meeting of the [[Budapest Open Access Initiative]] in February 2012."] ::

Personal life

Suber is married to Liffey Thorpe, professor emerita of Classics at Earlham College, with whom he has two daughters. Since 2003, he and Thorpe have resided in Brooksville, Maine.

His mother was Grace Mary Stern, who served in both houses of the Illinois state legislature.

Selected publications

• Knowledge Unbound (MIT Press, 2016)
• . Updates and supplements
• The Case of the Speluncean Explorers: Nine New Opinions (Routledge, 1998)
• The Paradox of Self-Amendment: A Study of Logic, Law, Omnipotence, and Change (Peter Lang Publishing, 1990)
• Self-Reference: Reflections on Reflexivity, co-edited with Steven J. Bartlett (Martinus Nijhoff, 1987)

Notes

References

References

1. "Home | Harvard OSC".
2. {{GoogleScholar. ogK4ZGQAAAAJ
3. "Harvard Open Access Project".
4. {{AcademicSearch. 3045213
5. (2006). "Support for the NIH Public Access Policy". Science.
6. "Keeping Up To Date On Scholarly Communication Issues". Library.uiuc.edu.
7. Suber, Peter Dain. (1978). "Kierkegaard's Concept of Irony especially in relation to Freedom, Personality and Dialectic". Northwestern University.
8. (2009-11-06). "SPARC". Arl.org.
9. "Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS) - EOS - Home".
10. (2011). "Noesis and the Encyclopedic Internet Vision". Synthese.
11. Suber, Peter. (1990). "The paradox of self-amendment: a study of logic, law, omnipotence, and change". P. Lang.
12. Suber, Peter. (1998). "The case of the speluncean explorers: nine new opinions". Routledge.
13. "Writings". Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
14. "Writings on Open Access". Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
15. Suber, Peter. (2016). "Knowledge Unbound". The MIT Press.
16. "Lingua Franca July/August 1999".
17. (October 2006). "The Charleston Advisor From Your Managing Editor Sixth Annual Readers' Choice Awards".
18. (8 January 2007). "L. Ray Patterson Copyright Award".
19. "Archived copy".
20. "Liffey's Home Page".
21. (19 May 1998). "Ex-Legislator, Grace Mary Stern".
22. (2016). "''Knowledge Unbound''". MIT Press.

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