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This book will itself be OA twelve months after it appears in print. (I’m glad you asked.) If you can’t wait, everything I’ve said here I’ve said in some form or another in an OA article.

I have freely incorporated some relevant earlier writings into this book, improving on them when I could. Notes at the end of the book indicate which pieces I adapted or incorporated into which sections. I chose this method as a solution to a pair of dilemmas. I did not want to hide the fact that I was making use of my previous work, but neither did I want to make any section into a stream of self-quotation and self-citation. I did not want to fail to benefit from my own previous work, but neither did I want to miss opportunities to clarify, update, or improve it.

This little book doesn’t say much about kindred topics such as open data, open educational resources, open government, free and open-source software, or open science (combining OA texts, open data, and open-source software, and providing these sorts of openness at every stage of a research project, not just at the end in reporting results). Some of the kindred forms of scholarly openness might soon be covered by other volumes in this series.

I would not have been able to give my full time to OA for so many years without grants from the Open Society Foundations, Wellcome Trust, and Arcadia and without financial or institutional support from Earlham College, Public Knowledge, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), the University of Maine, Data Conversion Laboratory, the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, the Harvard Law School Library, and the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication. For their generous support for OA and my work I thank Fay Bound Alberti, Peter Baldwin, Jack Balkin, Douglas Bennett, Len Clark, Darius Cuplinskas, Robert Darnton, Urs Gasser, Melissa Hagemann, Rick Johnson, Heather Joseph, Robert Kiley, Sue Kriegsman, Harlan Onsrud, John Palfrey, Lisbet Rausing, Stuart Shieber, David Skurnik, and Gigi Sohn.

I dedicate this book to the thousands of people in every field and country who have dedicated themselves to the realization of OA. The ones I know personally are already too numerous to thank by name in the preface to a short book, and the fact that there are more than I could thank by name—even if I tried—fills me with admiration, gratitude, and optimism.

* Please also see Peter Suber’s online page of updates and supplements to this book at http://bit.ly/oa-book.