Congrat's Peter! Peter Suber Wins ALA's L. Ray Patterson Copyright Award

Before we share a portion of the official ALA announcement about Peter Suber winning the Patterson Award we want to commend ALA’s OITP on their choice. Peter Suber’s work has a lot to do with the increased attention that open access publishing has received during the past several years. Attention is one thing but Peter is also a central figure for turning awareness into results. Peter’s work also illustrates that devotion to a cause, insightful thought and commentary and plain old hard work can bring change to something that needs changing. Congrats Peter!

Btw, the latest issue SPARC’s Open Access News (April, 2011) is now available. Peter is the editor. He also posts news about open access daily via the Open Access Tracking Project.

From ALA’s District Dispatch Post:

The American Library Association (ALA) Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) and its Copyright Advisory Subcommittee have named Peter Suber, JD, PhD., this year’s winner of the L. Ray Patterson Copyright Award.

The annual award recognizes contributions of an individual or group that pursues and supports the Constitutional purpose of the U.S. Copyright Law, fair use and the public domain. The award is named after L. Ray Patterson, a key legal figure who explained and justified the importance of the public domain and fair use. Fair use is a key exception of the copyright law that allows for the use of a copyright without prior authorization and helps to promote learning, new creativity, scholarship and criticism.

Professor Suber is being recognized for his work in the open access movement that began in academia in response to increasing costs of scholarly journals.  His goal is to provide free, public access to scientific information for the public good as well as provide an alternative venue for scientific publishing, one outside of the price-inflated research journal marketplace. Suber is a professor of philosophy at Earlham College, a senior researcher at Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and a Fellow at Harvard University Library’s Office for Scholarly Communication. He also is member of the Board of Enabling Open Scholarship and serves as Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge.

Read the Complete ALA’s District Dispatch Post

Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Awards, Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing