Abstract

My Open Access Reader is a compilation of excerpts that are open access and inform it as a subject. The excerpts are drawn from MIT Press books, published here with the open-source platform PubPub,1 a product of the MIT-spinoff Knowledge Futures. “Open access” is literature that’s digital, online, and free. As a process, cause, and effect, it’s a matter of law, crime, criminal justice, and security; business, communication, education, and technology. It’s an invention of the digital era, built on archaic “copyright.” I approach the Open Access Reader as an ongoing experiment in computational and open access publishing.2 In subsequent editions, I want to increase the Reader’s quantity and quality: how much there is, and how good it is. I may add Collections3 for each book and each subject (e.g., crime vs. law). These Collections may include ancillary OER with audio, video, and interactive features.4 There’s an AI ChatBot that I published but haven’t managed to make open. I made a Perusall-based “Book Club,” but I haven’t decided how exactly to use it with this Reader. And so on. But I’m getting ahead of myself... Currently, I consider the Open Access Reader to be a preprint: good enough to make public, but not “final final” because edits are expected.5 I encourage you to publicly or privately shape the Reader by, respectively, submitting an open review or emailing me.