Interview with Peter Suber: Unlocking Knowledge for Social Equity (for International Open Access Week 2021)

Interview with Peter Suber – Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, Senior Researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Earlham College.

In the view of many, Peter Suber has been a generous leader and guide not only among, but also to the brightest lights, clearest thinkers and most effective of collaborative practitioners in the Open Access to scholarly research movement - for at least the last two decades. In this wide ranging and timely interview for International Open Access Week 2021, Peter gives his expert, fact-based opinion on the origin, location and potential destination of various core elements of the Open Access movement and the scholarly communication system which it is so clearly shaping - now at speed.

Interview topics covered include but are not limited to:

• A brief history of Open Access - Peter Suber’s Open Access story
• Open Access and its language defined
• Open Access highlights of the last "5,10 or 15" years:
  • Open Infrastructure
    • The Next Generation Repositories (NGR) project by the Coalition of Open Access Repositories (COAR) - over 4,000 institutional repositories in place to accelerate repository-based (Green) Open Access
  • Plan S and other big funders moves toward Open Access
  • Transformative Agreements
  • International responses to the Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
    • San Francisco DORA statement
    • Leiden Manifesto
  • Controlled Digital Lending
• Corporate capture of proprietary infrastructure and its scholarly content
• Structural equity – challenges and green shoots
• Open peer review
• The "perfect" Australian Open Access policy