ATG Interviews Peter Suber

Senior Advisor on Open Access, Harvard Library and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project

Interview conducted by Michael Upshall (ConsultMU)

Transcript edited by Leah Hinds (Executive Director, Charleston Hub)

The following is an excerpt of an interview that was conducted for ATG the Podcast that aired on August 12, 2024.

Michael Upshall: Peter, welcome to ATG the podcast. It’s a real privilege, I think, to have one of the best-known figures in open access, the author of one of the most read introductions to open access (titled, as you might expect, Open Access), and a commentator in the whole area for many years.

Peter Suber: Thanks, Michael. Thanks for inviting me.

MU: Where I thought we might begin is to look at your background. You actually have an academic background. You started out as a philosopher.

PS: That’s right. I was a philosophy professor for more than 20 years. And then I got infatuated with open access and I wanted to work on it. There were only a handful of other people working on it at the time. This was early in our history, but they were doing it as professors. And I thought that would be nice. I could keep my job, but I decided I really had to work on it full time. So, I stepped down. I had a tenured senior professorship and I just left it for my second career.

MU: Fascinating. But before we even get to your involvement with open access, you also qualified as a lawyer, I believe.

PS: Yes, I’m also a lawyer, a non-practising lawyer, which means I don’t have clients, but I use my legal knowledge in advocating open access. For example, one of the perceived obstacles to open access is copyright. There are many, many copyright-safe ways to provide open access and I’m able to explain those.

MU: Sounds fascinating. So, let’s go into this, how you got involved with open access, because I think then it must have been a rarity, even today it’s a rarity. Most academics keep well away from policy issues, and exactly how their content is distributed. So why the fascination with open access?

PS: It’s a good question, apart from the fact that it’s interesting and important, which is usually a good enough explanation for anybody’s passion. I was a publishing scholar in my field, both philosophy and law, when the Internet came along. And when the Internet came along, I was fascinated by it. I should also add that I was a geek: I taught computer programming in my college. I just wanted to play with this new platform — there was a lot of excitement about it. In fact, it’s hard to recover the excitement of the Internet in its early days. Everybody was excited about it. And I wanted to see how it worked; I wanted to put videos online; I wanted to view videos online. I wanted to see how extensive it could be, how useful it could be. And, of course, there was a lot of junk on the Net in the early days. There were early versions of blogs, which really were trivial. You know, here’s what I had for breakfast. But there were also more important things on the Web, and I wanted to start to disentangle those and see what utility it might have. So, I started to put my scholarly publications online — mostly, I admit, to play with HTML, to see how that worked. And I needed some examples, so I just picked those. But I put them online. And, of course, I wasn’t thinking particularly about the business model; I just put them online, which at the time meant by default they were freely available to anybody. You didn’t have to pay. And that meant they were open access, in today’s terminology. They were not the fancy-formatted PDF versions of those; they were just playing HTML. But I noticed almost immediately that I started to get responses from scholars of exactly the kind I always wanted as a publishing scholar. You want to be part of a larger conversation; you want people to read it. Even if they criticize it, you want to be assured that they actually did read the thing, and you’re now a voice in a debate.

I got invited to publish in journals. I got invited to attend conferences. I got just plain feedback by email. Did you think about this argument or how do you respond to that argument? That’s exactly what I wanted. I was not getting that kind of feedback from the print editions of the same publications, even when they were fairly old. In other words, they’d been around long enough for people to find and read, and respond, if they felt like it. And so, I could have concluded, well, people just don’t care about what I’m writing. And maybe that’s also true to some extent. But once they were online, I started getting this feedback. So, some people did care, and they care to a greater extent, or at least the open-access character of the publications, and the existence of email, made it easier for them to reach out to the author. But I realized that this new geeky platform, which was so cool in other ways, was also a serious platform for scholarship, and that it would make scholarship finally achieve some of the ends that scholars themselves had in mind when they published their works. And so, I began to look around for other people, other scholars who had noticed this about the Internet or the Web. And there were a few, but very, very few. I connected with them. We conversed. There were new initiatives all the time. Even then (this was the mid-90s), there were a very small number of open access journals. Some were peer reviewed, and every now and then another one would pop up. People began to notice the potential for doing peer review journals on the Web, which is not the only scholarly application of open access, but I began to connect with them, and I wanted to read about the other scholarly developments that were taking place on the Web, especially the ones that were free of charge.

At this time, I was still employed as a full-time professor of philosophy. I really hoped that somebody would track all of these developments, write them up so that I could read them and get back to my other job. But nobody was doing that. They were occasionally launching a new initiative, and I applaud that. But nobody was writing up the latest developments for those who were following with interest. And so I decided I should do it! I started doing it with friends, the few friends that I had already met who cared about this. Then I made an email discussion list in my email application, which meant I could just add a new person and click a button, and my latest thoughts would go out to everybody on that list. Then I thought, well, if I’m going to just send a depersonalized email of new developments to a list of people, why don’t I make it a public list of people that anybody can sign up for? That was the beginning of my newsletter.

At first, the newsletter was really nothing more than these occasional emails that I would send to friends. But once it shifted platforms from an email to being a public newsletter, I began to take it more seriously, or I began to shift to the genre of a newsletter, and I began to write more like a journalist covering breaking news and more like a commentator on what’s happening in that news and whether it’s good or bad for scholarship and covering the debates about open access. Anyway, that was the origin of my newsletter. I had a sabbatical shortly after that started; I wrote an issue of the newsletter about once a week for the whole year, and then I had to go back to my job. The deal was you could get a sabbatical if you taught for a full year afterwards, because the sabbatical was an investment in your professional development. I went back, I shifted the newsletter to monthly so that I could get my work done, and I also launched a blog, so that I could post intermediate-sized thoughts without pushing them to the newsletter. But I also decided that year I should resign from my position, and work on open access full time. I did, and that was my last year of teaching. That was 2003.

MU: Is that the year when you went to the Harvard Office of Scholarly Communication?

PS: I started at the Office for Scholarly Communication in 2013, which was ten years later. So, after I quit my teaching position, I lived on grants. I had no salary, and I had no tenure either, of course. Giving up tenure, I thought, well, most people in the world don’t have tenure. How hard could it be? But I also knew that I had been funded already to work on open access, that it was a cause that some funders cared about, and I thought I could live on grants. I did pause to think, well, could I live on grants indefinitely? And how hard would that be? I didn’t really know, but I just knew that I had to work on this full time. And I did get funded initially. Then I renewed my funding, and then I got another funder. I made do until I got a salaried position again, ten years later: I lived on grants for ten years. That was the period of my most intensive work in public on open access. That’s when I wrote the news that appeared every month for a decade, but also a blog, articles, and a lot of public speaking.

Once I took the job at Harvard, it was a salaried job to run an office, and it was to implement open access; it was not the same as writing or speaking constantly about open access. I stepped back from the limelight, but I was still working 100% of my time on open access, and that gave me new insights into it, because the implementation has its own complexities. I was able to comment more on those nuts-and-bolts issues when I commented at all, and I was still writing a little bit. Since then, I’ve written less than I did during that grant-funded decade, but I still write, I still speak.

MU: I’m of a similar generation to you, and I recognize that kind of amazing opportunity provided by new technology. I was doing encyclopedias at the time, and we used to get one or two letters a month from people saying, you know, this fact is wrong, that fact is wrong. And then suddenly you publish online, and you get feedback, and you can find out what people are reading and what people are looking up. It’s amazing. It’s so fascinating.

PS: That anecdote about the encyclopedia reminds me of a test that Nature ran comparing the Encyclopaedia Britannica to Wikipedia. This was in the early days of Wikipedia, when it was notoriously unreliable. They took, I think, ten articles on historical subjects, and gave them to expert scholars in the field, and asked them to grade or to evaluate them. The Encyclopaedia Britannica articles got relatively higher grades than the Wikipedia articles, and the reviewing scholars pointed out errors in both the Wikipedia articles and the Britannica articles. But the interesting thing is the errors in the Wikipedia articles were corrected the next day, and the errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica had to wait for the next edition, which was years away.

MU: Absolutely. The changes introduced by technology are fascinating and there’s a period when everything seems to be possible. So, the real important milestone in open access is the Budapest Initiative, which I believe you were part of. It took place around that time that you left your philosophy post.

PS: Yes, the people who wrote the Budapest Initiative convened in 2001, which was my sabbatical year, the year I was working intensively on open access while still employed. We released our public statement in 2002. Yes, that was an important milestone, especially for us. We were brought together because we were all working on open access. We were among the few who were doing that at the time. We were brought together by the Open Society Institute (which is now called the Open Society Foundations). It was unclear whether all of us had the same vision, and whether our visions were even compatible with each other. So, one purpose of the meeting was to get together and talk about that: if our visions were compatible, let’s start to work together or let’s articulate a common vision, and start to pursue it, because we were very uncoordinated. My newsletter was called the Free Online Scholarship. This thing that we now call Open Access, was really called free online scholarship, but at that meeting we decided to call it open access.

Since people ask, I’ll just say, yes, we did it by analogy to open-source software. Open access is to scholarship, as opensource is to software. I liked Free Online Scholarship because it’s self-explanatory, and open access is not quite self-explanatory. That’s been a problem every now and then, because people either get the definition completely wrong, or they feel free to stretch it in certain ways. Some people think the term is ambiguous. One thing we did in the Budapest Statement was to define it, and the definition is not ambiguous, but maybe the term is ambiguous. One fact of our history is that the term spread further and faster than our definition. That’s just a fact and I’m sure it happens all the time with other initiatives, other movements. But it’s not a difficult concept. I’m happy with the term, and I started using it right away. I changed the title of my newsletter to the Open Access Newsletter. That’s when we coined the term. It’s also when we identified at least two strategies to achieve open access, the ones we now call green and gold. We did not call them that in the statement. Those terms are also not self-explanatory, and that also has caused problems. We distinguished open access through repositories as “green” from open access through journals as “gold.” We recommended them both and, by the way, to go back to the point, that we were trying to decide whether our approaches were compatible when we all agreed on this. We all agreed you could deliver open access through repositories or through journals. There was disagreement among us on whether journals were better than repositories for this purpose or the other way around. Those disagreements have never been resolved. In other words, they still, in the general scholarly world, disagree about those priorities. But they agree, they should agree, that both are vehicles for delivering bona-fide open access. We did that, and we got the Open Society Foundations to fund some initial steps toward open access. Up to $3 million, that is it gave the first $3 million to this cause. Since then, many other funders have been attracted to open access and began funding it themselves.

That statement was the first public, call it “manifesto” or “declaration,” for open access, the first public definition of open access, the first use of the term, and very soon many others followed. The next couple were slightly different. After that, most of the new declarations basically repeated the earlier declarations or elaborated them for some special field. That’s fine, but it seemed to me that there was a general consensus on what open access was, and what it would take to deliver it. There was just a lot of new work going on. Many of the later declarations were simply signs of approval: we like this, we’re calling on our constituents to help support it and deliver it.

MU: One of the remarkable things about the Budapest Declaration is how 20 years have gone past, and yet that declaration still stands up pretty well as a statement of what open access is. I find that quite remarkable, when you think of all the different manifestations and sort of variations on open access that have popped up since then. So I think you must have got something right back at that time.

PS: Yes. Thanks. I agree with that. We didn’t get into the kinds of details that people are debating today, like “What’s the best business model for an open access journal?” or “What’s the best business model for an open access book?” However, in the FAQ that accompanied the Budapest Initiative, we said there were many different possible business models, and we supported experimentation and further study. We didn’t think anybody ever had to settle on just one as the only one compatible with the definition; we should expect a range of different business models. I think that was the right approach to take, but it also supports the current experimentation. So I’m very glad to see that. Some business models are actually not very good. The fact that they’re not very good doesn’t mean open access is bad. It means that business model has problems, and there are other ones that we could try or should try instead.

MU: I think another reason for the success of your book Open Access, which came out about 2012, is that it doesn’t go into great detail about business models, but sticks to the principles. I read it maybe just a couple of years ago, and it struck me as still standing up today as a clear statement of what Open Access is. But of course, there are lots of things that have happened since then to make a new edition or rewrite it. started to put my scholarly publications online — mostly, I admit, to play with HTML, to see how that worked… but I noticed almost immediately that I started to get responses from scholars of exactly the kind I always wanted as a publishing scholar. You want to be part of a larger conversation; you want people to read it.”

PS: That’s a good question. The day after the book was published, I launched an online wiki with my updates and supplements. It’s a short book, and there were many points I wanted to make that didn’t fit into the short book. I wanted to post them as quickly as possible, so I waited until the day of publication, then I posted them. Once I had that online wiki, I used it to post further supplements and updates. I’ve never stopped; I tapered off a couple of years ago, but I still add an occasional new update. Today there are more than 800 updates and supplements. I encourage anybody who reads the book or likes the book to at least look at the updates and supplements, because they bring it more up to date. If I make a point or a conclusion in the book, and it’s the subject of further studies, either to support the conclusion or to criticize the same conclusion, I post it there, so people can follow the debate. I’m glad that most new studies have confirmed the conclusions that I made, and very few have criticized them or shown them to be not quite as true as we thought.

I’ve never been strongly tempted to make a second edition. One reason is that it would have to be just about as short. It’s part of a series at MIT Press of short books on important topics. The only second edition that would really satisfy me would be one that’s much, much longer, that took all these updates and supplements into account, that would be like four times longer. If I had to write another short introduction to open access, it might be completely different. The hot issues in 2012 were a little different from the hot issues today. And by the way, the same is true with the Budapest Initiative. I’m not tempted to write that new book addressing the current hot issues, because I addressed them in other ways, in public talks, or in social media, or in journal articles. But on Budapest, just for a second, the issues we addressed in 2001 (published in 2002), we revisited, and we published a ten-year anniversary statement, in which we reaffirmed the basic principles of the Budapest Statement, but also added many new detailed recommendations that addressed the hot issues of the time.

And we did that again on the 20th anniversary. On that anniversary, we did something a little different. On the tenth anniversary, we deliberately wrote a long list of recommendations to be more helpful. That is, some of them were getting into very specific areas. For the 20th anniversary, we decided to write a small new set of recommendations, isolating what we thought of as the top priorities; so we wrote only four recommendations. And those are still the four that I think of as the hottest issues, the most important ones today: they’re about supporting open access on open infrastructure, reforming research assessment, moving away from APCs, and moving away from what are called transformative agreements or read-and-publish agreements. By studying those four, we hope to draw attention to the top priority issues when we could have made, you know, a hundred detailed recommendations on more specific points. I hope the strategy works, and that people are taking our judgment seriously about what are the biggest issues, and our arguments in favor of how to approach those issues.

MU: I was just going to come on to APCs and transformative agreements, because some people would say that the whole open-access mission has been to some extent distorted by the use of APCs, which has just kind of continued subscription publishing by another name. Do you see it that way, that APCs have distorted the whole open-access movement?

PS: Yes. On the one hand, they’re compatible with genuine open access; in that sense they have not distorted the whole open access movement. On the other hand, I think they’re a bad business model for open access. They were just starting at the time of the first Budapest statement. It was too early to make a judgment, and we didn’t make a judgment. It was one of the many business models included in our general statement; there are many business models, and let’s experiment with them. Since then, there’s been a lot of experimentation with them.

There have been many results. One result that everybody knows is that the large for-profit corporate publishers found they could make money with APCs roughly comparable to the money they make from subscriptions, and that made them happy to shift over. It took them a while to realize that, and until they realized that, they were pretty strong opponents of open access. Now they’re generally in favor, provided they can charge for it, significant amounts for it, and provided they can own the intellectual property. I think both of those are mistakes. That is, I want to avoid open access in which publishers own the copyrights, and I want to avoid open access that charges somebody on the author’s side, charges the authors themselves, because that excludes authors who can’t afford to pay. It excludes authors on economic grounds, independently of the value of what they have to say. I prefer business models that don’t do that, so I’m one of the people who is speaking against APCs. It’s not true that the Budapest initiative encouraged APCs, but it opened the door to APCs. That’s true. I didn’t speak out against them until, let’s say, the evidence built up that they were inequitable, that they were harmful, that they were exclusionary, and that there were alternatives that would work at least as well.

We’re still in that period: the non-APC business models are proving themselves. There’s more than one, more than ten, actually, and they’re all being tested, which is a good thing. We should be empirical about this. They are growing, which is a good thing. Awareness of them is relatively low. It’s still the case, it’s been a case for about 15 years, that most people think all open access is journal-based, as opposed to repository based. That is, all of it is gold rather than green. They tend to think all of it is based on APCs, when in fact, relatively little of it is based on APCs. But we still face the misunderstanding that open access means APC-based open access. That’s a mistake or a misunderstanding that we have to correct. You’ve probably heard me say, many times, that the biggest obstacle to open access is misunderstanding. I still believe that one of the top misunderstandings is that people believe the only way to deliver open access is through APCs. Just not true.

Editor’s Note: Thank you to Michael Upshall for conducting a series of podcast interviews for ATG the Podcast, and to Peter Suber for agreeing to speak with us. Check out ATG the Podcast for more!